Prime time ethics

Medical ethics debates move into prime time TV with the second season of Grey's Anatomy spin-off, Private Practice, premiering Wednesday night.

Creators of the show say they hope to distinguish it from Grey's by tackling ethical issues throughout the season. Researcher and writer Elizabeth Klaviter, who also writes for Grey's, says the show will draw on real-life medical dilemmas.

"We look at the things that have ourselves and our family members and friends buzzing — the issues that people are talking about in terms of right or wrong and the laws, ethics and social morays that are put on us in terms of how we conduct ourselves."

There is plenty to draw on.

This season, the doctors will have to decide what rights prostitutes have to medical care and whether to treat a sex offender at their child-friendly practice. They will debate abortion and grapple with whether to deliver a premature baby they believe was conceived solely because the umbilical-cord blood could save the family's older, dying child. Another doctor wonders what to do when a teenager — who has HIV but doesn't know it — says he plans to have sex for the first time.

"We're telling stories ... that will provide a lot of moral debate among our doctors and maybe debate at home when you watch," said series creator Shonda Rhimes.

Comments

[deana]

This description of ethics is alarming... It isn't ethics!

What they're doing by MEANS of the show--not ON the show--is to scramble and reinvent the meaning and application of ethics. It's a morality transplant.

Ethics are a simple matter. You don't cause harm to another person... If they have caused harm you don't appoint yourself their judge. Doctors must absolutely stay out of the judging and moralizing business. As people who have all sorts of protection-by-proxy going on (they represent the state's medical policies) they will never ever sense or achieve the level of compassion or circumspection needed to be character judges. Furthermore, aren't they supposed to be rushed off their feet? Is this value judgment part of their day the perk of the job? The fun, sexy, TV-worthy, low-cut blouse, look-what-this-small-boned-pretty-girl-also-does part?

There is a mentality creeping (rushing) in to present day culture that has a terrible infantility to it; as though someone else just moved in next door and thinks he knows the neighbourhood better than others. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It comes with the disquieting sense of "these people knew nothing until I showed them how it's done."

These shows can't even be said to be naive. They're destructive and unabashedly trashy. People watch them because of the hairdos, clothes, boob and facelifts. The only message of these shows is "condemn anyone who isn't shopping at XXX, going to ZZZ gym and wearing YYY labels so he/she can flirt better."

This isn't ethics. It's just promotion of superficial image and a nice washed appearance as the much quicker and easier BRAND of ethic. Any darn premise will do. In this case, it's condemning society's renegades and mental cases.

Oh, let's not forget head-injured organ donors. Everything's going this way now, and really fast. Wait for that one! The latest on that score is that doctors really hate being "forced" by over-zealous good Samaritan family members to remove life support from their comatose children and harvest organs. Good grief!

Never before have doctors questioned whether to help prostitutes, molesters or the brain injured. Why now? And why do the writers of these shows make out as though these should have been burning questions in Hippocrates' mind 3000 years ago?

Tacky, tacky, tacky "just do it" garbage.