著者
塚原 久美
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.28, pp.38-48, 2010-09-24 (Released:2018-02-01)

In this article, I would like to address the problems of the Japanese government's policy on reproductive rights from the viewpoint of development of reproductive control technologies. The problems were rooted in an old and unrefined abortion method spread in this country in spite of the international principle of reproductive health and rights. Reproductive Rights are the series of human rights relating to reproduction and reproductive health, which were explicitly recognized at the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in 1994. These rights are key to women's dignity and gender equality, and articles of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, serve as a basis for these rights, as well as those of the UN declaration of Human Rights (1948) and several other International covenants for human rights. Reproductive rights were only possible after the development of abortion methods that assuage the tension between the pro-life position and women's rights. However, the Japanese government's continuing opposition to the advice of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women to legalize abortion came about because of the fixation on the feto-centric and women-exclusive view of abortion. Such a policy should be replaced by a more humane, inclusive view of reproduction in order to improve reproductive healthcare and to eliminate discrimination against women in Japan.
著者
財吉拉胡
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.32, pp.43-52, 2014 (Released:2018-02-01)

Traditional Mongolian medicine is a system that assimilates both the theory and practice of Tibetan medicine, which entered into Mongolian society along with the spread of Tibetan Buddhism over the last several centuries. Traditional medicine in Inner Mongolia was then forcibly modernized when the Japanese colonial medical enterprise developed in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia during the first half of the 20th century. Moreover, after the establishment of People’s Republic of China, western modern medicine was popularized throughout China, including Inner Mongolia. Meanwhile, traditional Chinese medicine too became widespread into the Mongolian-settled areas, as ethnic Han Chinese people settled in Inner Mongolia. Mongolian medicine was then admitted into the official professional medical sector by the government, alongside Chinese medicine. Subsequently, the government established institutions in the higher educational system for traditional Mongolian medicine and set up traditional medical hospitals. In recent decades, however, with the spread of globalization, this medicine has lost its main position in the medical order of Mongolian society and gradually been transformed into an ethnically sustainable form of alternative medicine. For traditional Mongolian medicine to sustain itself alongside other types of practice will involve continuing modernization to satisfy the needs of local consumers.
著者
加藤 太喜子
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.31, pp.33-41, 2013 (Released:2018-02-01)

Regulation for use of tissue of aborted human fetuses for research is enforced in countries and international organizations such as World Medical Association and the Council of Europe. For these parties, the use of fetal tissue is permissible when conditions prescribed by the guidelines are met. Common requirements for permissible use are ① approval by the Ethics Committee; ② determination of provision of fetal tissue after the decision of abortion; and ③ consent of the provider. Some guidelines require that the man is not rejecting, but there is also one guideline that accepts only the consent of the woman. In any guidance, the consent by woman is essential. From the perspective of systems of providing information, this paper presents a literature survey of the use of fetal tissue. It was found that ① daily, open exchange of views about provision of fetal tissue is not possible for women; ② women hope and want to know the intended use of the fetal tissue and the overall description of the research; ③ although information needed to grasp the overall idea of the research is sorely lacking, women may make decisions under pressure. On the basis of the results, people who are requested to provide information later are required to provide information that is satisfactory for decision making, instead of unsatisfactory information such as those labeled as“ being offered to know/not being offered to know”. For this reason, the current“ sufficient” explanation should be re-examined as to whether it is truly a satisfactory explanation.
著者
石川 洋子
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.28, pp.1-9, 2010-09-24 (Released:2018-02-01)

Advocacy in nursing, is a central concept in terms of protecting the interests and rights of patients as well as establishing and improving the expertise and social status of nurses. In fact, advocacy is a role played not only by nurses, but by all medical professionals. Advocacy is an important concept for nursing with extensive meaning and contents. Consequently, confusion can occur due to the uncertainty advocacy poses for nursing practice. Moreover, advocacy is accompanied by risk and difficulty, and there are no clear guidelines on how to implement it. It is necessary to enhance education and improve the workplace environment to practice advocacy effectively. It is also essential that nurses reconsider their values and how they support patients while collaborating with other medical professionals.
著者
新山 喜嗣
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.33, pp.30-40, 2015-09-30 (Released:2018-02-01)

We are afraid that our non-existence continues forever after our death. Lucretius spoke on this fear, stating, "Because no one fears the eternal nonentity which is in front of our birth, it isn't also necessary to fear the eternal nonentity in our after death," as a way to convince people to be rid of this fear. This statement is called Lucretius' "symmetry argument". Yet despite this, almost all modern debaters have insisted that the relation between pre-birth non-existence and post-mortem non-existence is asymmetrical. The main purpose of this article concerns the following two points about this statement of asymmetry; namely, that this statement is premised on a specific view of metaphysics and that the meaning of the claim of asymmetry must be examined from a viewpoint of metaphysics as it relates to time and the world. In this study, I first pointed out that the opinion of debaters included the assumption that we ourselves could identify non-existence. Next, I pointed out that the disputants would actually be insisting that the dead continue to exist in some form. Third, I examined which specific theories on time from twentieth-century analytic philosophy suited the disputants' opinion, and found that no ideas on time were entirely consistent with their view. Lastly, I examined non-existence before birth and non-existence post-mortem from a viewpoint of the possible worlds semantics of analytic philosophy. From this, both non-existences are located in their own possible worlds, and in addition to this, there is the real world in which the subject is alive. My examination concluded that there is a difference in existence qualification between a possible world and the real world, but that there was no such difference between two possible worlds. This suggests that the relationship between pre-birth non-existence and post-mortem non-existence is neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical.
著者
森 禎徳
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.33, pp.10-20, 2015-09-30 (Released:2018-02-01)

Withholding medical treatment to neonates born with congenital diseases has been prevailed in many countries since the 1970s. In Japan, several guidelines have been established that classify the cases in which we are permitted to withhold life-prolonging treatment. Nonetheless, no definite social consensus has been reached about whether and how withholding treatment because of disability can be ethically valid. Our aim in this study was to clarify the standards of withholding medical treatment to handicapped neonates that are ethically justifiable. First, we point out that withholding treatment to infants is essentially different from ordinary cases because the infant patients utterly lack autonomy. Then, we argue that "intolerable suffering," "quality of life," and even "the best interest" can never compensate for the lack of autonomy. These principles are inadequate for the standard we seek because objective validity is required for the criterion to justify selective nontreatment of infants with handicaps but aforementioned principles can acquire only subjective and individual validity. Consequently, we examined the justifiability of deciding selective nontreatment, which can be both ethical and feasible, claiming the importance of changing our point of view from an individual to a social level, and of a decision-making system based on a broad consensus, not on personal will. Meanwhile, we propose introducing palliative care for terminally ill neonates in order to provide them with dignified end-of-life phase.
著者
伊藤 幸郎
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.20, pp.95-108, 2002-11-10 (Released:2018-02-01)

EBM (Evidence-based Medicine) has been prevailed in the medical world since the last decade of the 20th century. It was originally called Clinical Epidemiology. The advocates of EBM declared that it brought about a paradigm shift into clinical medicine. As compared to biomedicine, which gives pathophysiological explanations of clinical phenomena, the methodology of EBM is phenomenological and probabilistic, while that of biomedicine is ontological and deterministic. However, these two are inseparable sides of scientific medicine. EBM has several advantages. Because it is a kind of inductive inference, the results obtained by using EBM can be shown as clear evidence to everyone. In policy making EBM contributes to establishing the standards of healthcare. Through EBM we can see that all the laws of medicine are only probabilistic and medical judgments are always falliable. Science is neutral in regard to the system of human values. Therefore, EBM is a new tool which we can employ to develop our good values.
著者
杉岡 良彦
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.29, pp.15-25, 2011-09-30 (Released:2018-02-01)

The purpose of this article is to discuss the relationship between scientific research and spirituality. Thus far, many epidemiological researchers have studied the positive effects of spirituality on depression. Borg et al. showed a negative association between inter-individual variability of serotonin 5-HT_<1A> receptor binding potential and spiritual acceptance, whereas Karlson et al. reported no association between them. Although the 5-HT_<1A> receptor plays a crucial role in major depression, neither of these studies showed a positive association between the 5-HT_<1A> receptor binding potential and spiritual acceptance. Thus, both these studies deny the possibility that the 5-HT_<1A> receptor may be a confounding factor connecting spirituality and depression. Generally, there are two different negative attitudes to such researches: some think that spirituality is a mystical and non-scientific concept, which is inappropriate for medical research, while others believe that the transcendent(i.e., God) cannot be examined by scientific methods. Our stance depends on neither of these attitudes, but if spirituality does in fact influence our health, we should confirm whether biological research on spirituality is possible because spiritual experiences have a close association with our brain. This viewpoint may resonate with the theological perspective of imago Dei, wherein the human being as a whole is believed to be the bearer of the divine image in a spiritual as well as in a physical dimension. The effects of spirituality on health are open to scientific research. The purpose of introducing the concept of spirituality to medical science is to reject the reductionist view of human beings and to consider each individual as a whole.
著者
吉田 一史美
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.31, pp.11-21, 2013 (Released:2018-02-01)

In the 1940s in Japan, professionally trained midwives, not doctors, assisted most births by pregnant women. Also, midwives sometimes arranged for the formal or informal adoptions of infants whose parents could not raise them. In 1948, a midwife was arrested for letting an estimated 103 infants left for adoption die at the Kotobuki Maternity Home in Tokyo since 1944. The infanticides were seen as a result of strict anti-abortion regulations in wartime; the incident was used to promote the passage of the Eugenic Protection Law in 1948 to legalize abortion. Most researchers have mentioned infanticides by midwives in the context of women’s reproductive freedom and the decline of midwifery since the 1950s in Japan. This paper uses the perspective of protecting infants’ lives to examine how the infanticide incident affected the situations of women with unintended pregnancies and infants relinquished by their parents. The paper deals with historical materials from mainly the 1930s and 1940s, including newspapers, governmental documents and specialist journals for midwives. From the 1930s to right after the end of World War II, midwives were in charge of giving infant health care counseling and sheltering infants for adoption arrangements. However, after the Kotobuki Maternity Home incident, midwives were prohibited from sheltering infants or arranging adoptions. The Eugenic Protection Law was enacted in 1948 to allow women to undergo abortions; also, infants’ homes and children’s welfare centers, which had been established by the Child Welfare Law of 1947, were given the responsibility of sheltering infants and arranging child adoptions. Furthermore, midwives’ responsibility for infant health care was taken over by public community nurses. The child welfare systems constructed in the postwar era treated pregnant women and infants separately, ending midwives’ more holistic protection of infants’ lives through their interconnected responsibilities of assisting pregnant women and caring for infants.
著者
田野尻 哲郎
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.27, pp.1-12, 2009-10-01 (Released:2018-02-01)

Modern Japanese traditional medicine established in the mid-18th century suffered devastating damage due to the execution of the Medical Law (established in 1873) as an integral part Japan's modernization policies. Today, Japanese traditional medicine is a counterculture community on the periphery of modern mainstream medicine, whose practice changes in accordance with social changes. As a traditional medical movement, it has unique ethics that are constantly evolving. The traditional medical movement of a physical technique, which is known as "Noguchi-Seitai" and whose system and theory were established in 1927, passed through two transformation stages, one in 1956 and the other one in 1968. The movement become a community emerging concomitantly with medical techniques continuously alternating between a host and a guest, and the medical practice based on the psychosomatic transformations arose from self-training by the medical practitioner and the patient. Those transformations and generations are revealed from the conceptual viewpoint of "Education as Transformation" (Richard Katz, 1981).
著者
森 芳周
出版者
日本医学哲学・倫理学会
雑誌
医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.33, pp.1-9, 2015-09-30 (Released:2018-02-01)

Fetal tissues and organs are useful for regenerative medicine or other medical research. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare formed a committee in 2002 to examine regulations on clinical research using human stem cells. The committee had planned to settle on regulations including for stem cells collected from dead fetuses(for example, fetal neural stem cells) though they were exempt from the regulations in the end. Thus, though fetal tissues and organs are usually used in medical research, it is not clear how dead fetuses are disposed or buried and what is the ethically proper procedure to handle them. In this article, I survey procedures for the handling of dead fetuses and their legal status in Germany to clarify the problems involved in this task. Legal regulations concerning the treatment of dead fetuses have been reformed since the late 1990s in Germany. According to the German Civil Status Act, parents of a stillborn child, that is, a dead fetus weighing more than 500g, may register the child's name in birth records. Though a miscarried child, that is, a dead fetus weighing less than 500g, cannot be registered in any records, a certification is issued in which the child's name is entered in accordance with the parents' request. As for burial, it is governed by the law of each state. Most states require parents to bury a fetus when it exceeds a certain weight, and permit burial of a fetus upon parents' request if the weight is below threshold. These regulations were induced as a result of petitions from parents who had experienced a miscarriage or a stillbirth. Thus, when considering the procedures to treat dead fetuses, both the dignity of the unborn child and the feelings of the bereaved parents must be taken into account.