Surgery is a medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, to help improve bodily function or appearance, or sometimes for some other reason. An act of performing surgery may be called a surgical procedure, operation, or simply surgery. In this context, the verb operating means performing surgery. The patient or subject on which the surgery is performed can be a person or an animal. A surgeon is a person who performs operations on patients. Persons described as surgeons are commonly medical practitioners, but the term is also applied to physicians, podiatric physicians, dentists and veterinarians. Surgery can last from minutes to hours, but is typically not an ongoing or periodic type of treatment. The term surgery can also refer to the place where surgery is performed, or simply the office of a physician, dentist, or veterinarian. In addition, surgeons must decide when an operation is necessary, and also treat many non-surgical issues, particularly in the surgical intensive care unit (SICU), where a variety of critical issues arise.
Religion in Surgery
Some issues concerning if the patient will undergo a certain operation is a matter of religion and is definitely hard to answer. Religion is a basic structure of one person’s personality and most of the things he do are based on his belief. As a professional in medicine, this is a common case and there is no solution in this. During ancient times, the people believe that sickness was brought by a sorceress or someone’s who deals with black art. The only answer they could give is to call some sort of ancient gods and goddesses. In early eastern culture, the doctors use herbals or different class of plants to cure the sick. The scalpel is not yet introduced and opening the live part of the body is critically condemned. But today, the surgery is legalized and protected by certain laws. The person who will undergo for this kind of medical practice must be mentally, physically, and emotionally prepared. And in my own view, the people who only take their religion as an excuse are people who are not that prepared enough or they are still in the past principle of healing. When we talk religion in the medicinal aspect, many issues will surely arise. Religion is important of life and if you don’t believe in something, the aspect of who you are is not that stable.
Ethics in Surgery
In recent times, many of those responsible for teaching ethical principles to medical students have emphasized four generally agreed basic moral obligations relevant to medical practice. This has provided a simpler framework for discussion and application of ethical principles in clinical practice.
· Autonomy is defined as the right of individuals to make decisions on their own behalf. While most societies have long recognized a basic moral obligation to respect each person's autonomy, it is only relatively recently that this ethical principle has evolved to be of such central importance in the doctor-patient relationship.
· Beneficence is defined as the duty to do the best for the individual patient. Even this relatively straightforward obligation is being challenged at various times and from different quarters. These challenges include such matters as who is to decide what is best, an issue of autonomy, and the availability of the required resources, an issue of justice.
· Non-maleficence is defined as the duty to do no harm. This also appears to be a relatively straightforward moral obligation and probably is the ethical principle best understood and most widely adhered to in clinical practice. However, as medical inventiveness yields new techniques and new diagnostic tests, subtle potential breaches of this obligation are not readily identified by enthusiastic innovators, as may be seen with the premature promotion of new tests for population screening or 'earlier' diagnosis for a variety of ailments.
· Justice is more difficult to define but incorporates notions of equity and fair distribution. While it may be tempting for doctors to shun this obligation, leaving it to managers, administrators and government, this is neither realistic nor desirable. Increasingly, however, the latter groups will be seen to arbitrate between the claims and counter-claims for resources of various specialist groups. This ethical principle emphasizes that the doctors have a responsibility to the community at large as well as to individual patients.
Law in Surgery
Every individual or society is governed or protected by the law of their constitution. If there is a medical malpractice done by a surgeon on its patients, the patient has a right to sue the surgeon. If the surgeon, or rather the hospital or medical institution did not receive any payment from the patient therefore, they have the right sue against the patient. It is only a matter of obligation in each party and they must comply in their respective responsibilities. At some point there is a conflict between the law and the ethics with regards to the medicine.
The conflict between specific ethical principles, or conflict between the conscience of the individual doctor and a legal request for medical services which are morally unacceptable to that doctor, are dilemmas with which the medical profession is familiar. As society through its parliament and its courts increasingly wishes to use the law to regulate aspects of medical practice, situations will arise where the law appears to be in direct conflict with the generally agreed ethical code of the profession.
Source
Breen, K. J, et al., Ethics, Law and Medial Practice: St. Leonards, N.S.W. 1997, 7-8. Accessed: 07 July 2009, from: >URL:http://www.questia.com/read/57187061
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