Legal and ethical responsibilities of health care professionals

¶ … health care professional's legal responsibilities overlap with his or her ethical duties? Give examples.

Ethical Dilemmas in Healthcare

Healthcare professionals have generated numerous debates in the recent years as a result of their tendency to overlap legal matters when they came across ethical dilemmas. Poor health often prevents patients from thinking rationally and these individuals can sometimes be unable to properly understand the condition they are in. As a consequence, doctors sometimes need to intervene and perform actions against people's will. Healthcare professionals experience intense feelings as they feel that the law prevents them from assisting a patient correctly and thus come to consider that it is essential for them to perform immoral acts in order to do their jobs.

The concept of mercy killing is probably one of the most commonly encountered topics when taking into account the issue of healthcare professionals trying to choose between performing legal acts and moral acts. "The doctor should give the terminally-ill woman a drug that will kill her because there is little chance that he will be found out and punished" (Siegelman & Rider 427). He or she knows that performing this act would benefit the woman and her family, but also acknowledges that he risks losing his license and getting thrown in prison as a result of interfering in a matter that does not concern him personally.

As doctors consider that it is their job to assist patients, they come to feel that they hands are tied when they come across a situation that requires their involvement, but that also requires that they perform illegal acts. While some people would support a doctor who does everything in his or her power with the purpose of helping a patient, others would consider that particular acts are disrespectful toward the medical community and toward society as a whole. Doctors are obligated to uphold a system of laws and individuals who act against this respective system are practically considered outlaws.

Laws are primarily meant to assist individuals and to impose order in society. Some individuals risk falling victim to dishonest doctors or to relatives that are self-interested. As a consequence, it would be better for doctors in most cases to stick to respecting the law, especially considering that the contemporary society needs to promote the fact that life is one of the most important things and that it needs to be protected at any price.

There are some cases when doctors act illegally because they know that doing otherwise would seriously endanger someone. For example, "the case of a pregnant Florida woman hospitalized against her will is raising a legal, ethical and medical storm around this issue: Can a doctor's order to quit smoking and rest in bed trump a woman's right to control her own body?" (Stein & Krueger). While the Court of Law claimed that the doctor was right in taking on this attitude, it is obvious that the doctor himself or herself had trouble deciding whether or not he or she had the right to do so. This particular doctor considered that it was essential to constrain the woman because she risked hurting both herself and her unborn baby as a result of her erratic behavior.