
Ep. 14: The Principle of Double Effect
Bioethics on Air
00:00
Can You Apply the Principle of Pharmacological Intervention in a Practical Healthcare Ethics Question?
If you for example need to take an antihistamine it can have side effects like causing drowsiness. You're directly intending that good effect of addressing whatever kind of allergic type reaction you might be having and you are not achieving that effect through the drowsiness obviously. And then of course you probably have a proportionate reason for going ahead with that. Again it becomes very yeah okay so it becomes very apparent when we talk about something like chemotherapy. The destruction of healthy cells does not occur through the destruction of cancer cells but rather the effects occur contemporaneously. So your answer is going to be based on how effective the doctors think this treatment will be for you.
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