The Ethical Challenges of Emerging Medical Technologies

This collection of essays emphasizes society’s increasingly responsible engagement with ethical challenges in emerging medical technology. Expansion of technological capacity and attention to patient safety have long been integral to improving healthcare delivery but only relatively recently have concepts like respect, distributive justice, privacy, and autonomy gained some power to shape the development, use, and refinement of medical tools and techniques. Medical ethics goes beyond making better medicine to thinking about how to make the field of medicine better. These essays showcase several ways in which modern ethical thinking is improving safety, efficacy and efficiency of medical technology, increasing access to medical care, and empowering patients to choose care that comports with their desires and beliefs. Included are complimentary ethical approaches as well as compelling counter-arguments. Together, the articles demonstrate how improving the quality of medical technology relies on every stakeholder -- not just medical researchers and scientists -- to assess each given technology’s strengths and pitfalls. This collection also portends one of the next major issues in the ethics of medical technology: developing the requisite moral framework to accompany shifts toward patient-centred personalized healthcare.