Dental Practice
1. Asking Dr Diamond to defend his policy 2. Consulting with other staff to see if they concur that the practice is unacceptable and jointly asking Dr Diamond to permit…
Duty to Treat
The AIDS epidemic has posed so many controversial ethical issues for dentistry that virtually all of the important problems of this book could be addressed in the context of bloodborne…
About Whether Procedures Are Beneficial
In two previous chapters we have looked systematically at the problems of balancing harms and good (chapter 6) and allocating scarce resources (chapter 10). Often the good that needs to…
in Academic Life
Schools of dentistry, like other academic settings, provide a context for many ethical problems, including cheating on examinations, stealing books and school property, and straightforward physical abuses. In addition, dental…
Allocating Dental Benefit at the Societal Level
The cases in the previous three chapters posed problems in which a dentist faced a conflict between following the principle of beneficence (doing what would appear to do the most…
Critical Concepts
1. Treatment alternatives and their risks and benefits 2. Who will perform the treatment and what the charges will be 3. Differing views of treatment options held by other dentists…
Is Owed to the Patient
1. One possibility is that he could approach the problem by holding himself accountable to the standard of quality that his colleagues similarly situated would have provided. Then, if he…
Relation of Benefits and Harms
Ethical problems in dentistry, like ethical problems in general, can sometimes be approached by looking at which general principles are at stake. Two of the most obvious are that actions…
