Citation

Zheng X, Zhang L, Ji Y, Fan X. Chinese Journal of Tissue Engineering Research 2005; (53): 237-239.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

OBJECTIVE:To analyze the medico-ethical problems of epilepsy from Medi-ethics and its effect on improving the quality of life of the persons with epilepsy.DATA SOURCES:Articles were computer-searched from Chinese Journal of Medico-ethics, Chinese Journal of Clinical Neurology, Chinese Medical Journal, Chinese Journal of NeuroMed, Chinese Journal of Nerval Mental Disorder from January 1989 to December 2004 with the key words of "epilepsy, medico-ethics and social discrimination". And the language was restricted to Chinese. And we also selected two books, which were Bioethics written by Shen Ming-xian, and The Prevention and Therapy of Epilepsy written by Zhou Zheng-xin for reference.STUDY SELECTION: From all the preliminarily screened papers, 98 papers were obtained related to epidemiology, sociology and ethics.DATA EXTRACTION: Repeated and similar papers were excluded. 10 papers and books were selected from the 98 papers, which touched upon the problems of the epileptics and their life quality. The 10 papers have involved many cross discipline subjects, such as Bioethics, Medico-ethics,and Socio-ethics, which provided more concern about the epileptics from multiple directions.DATA SYNTHESIS: Ethics indicate the principles and guidelines for relationships between people. The ethics explored here refer to normative ethics. Generally, the basic ethical principles are: respect, beneficialness,balance and justice. Since some epileptic patients lack in the knowledge of epilepsy and proper treatment and suffer from discrimination in the health care, more untreated and non-proper treatment, doctors and nursing persons should take the attitude of being beneficial to the patients. Medication for the epileptics, especially the female patients at the first period of pregnancy, the incidence of the deformed children was high. Should the principle of beneficence be applied to mothers or children? The number of the operative treatment was more and more in patients with epilepsy, while surgery itself is a risk behavior.If there is no better method to choose, and all the available choices have their advantage and disadvantages. Physicians can only choose the better one from the two kinds of harm, trying to make the patientssuffer the least harm with the largest effect. Aggressive behaviors can be observed during seizure or unconsciousness state. Controlling the moving range of the patients with epilepsy consciously is in accord with the general ethical behavior, on the contrary, confinement disobeys the morals and the curative effect is not good. The extreme behavior of the patients with epilepsy is suicide and occurred more in unemployed, unmarried and living alone, male, and patients with mental disorders in epilepsy. The direct reasons of suicide are unemployment, low social status, and little understanding and care from their communities, families and friends.The sensible ethical principle for epileptics is to treat the patients as normal people in the society.

CONCLUSION: Epileptic crowd need care from the society, family and other factors. Proper considering ethical principle in treating the population is the humane solicitude and to help the patients regain health and improve the life quality.

Language: zh