American Thyroid Association develops ethics guidelines for thyroidology

In this changing era of health care delivery, physician guidelines on ethics are more important than ever. As each specialty area faces its own issues and dilemmas regarding patient care, scarcity of resources, and conflicts of interest, the American Thyroid Association has developed ethics guidelines specific to the field of thyroidology. These key guidelines are published in Thyroid, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers and the official journal of the American Thyroid Association (ATA), and are available free on the Thyroid website.

M. Sara Rosenthal, Peter Angelos, David Cooper, Cheryl Fassler, Stuart Finder, Marguerite Hays, Beatriz Tendler, and Glenn Braunstein (Chair), for the American Thyroid Association Ethics Advisory Committee, present guidelines that are intended to provide clear guidance about ethical dilemmas and questions that arise in this unique subspecialty. As detailed in "Clinical and Professional Ethics Guidelines for the Practice of Thyroidology," they address ethical dilemmas that arise in the patient setting and those that involve disclosure of conflicts of interest and professional integrity.

"These detailed guidelines, written by an interdisciplinary group of experts in thyroidology, endocrine surgery, and ethics, offer guidance for ethical questions in the clinical and the research realm. Moreover, they address important issues surrounding conflicts of interest and resource allocations," says Peter A. Kopp, MD, Editor-in-Chief of Thyroid and Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Molecular Medicine, and Director ad interim of the Center for Genetic Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago.

"We owe our thanks to Dr. Glenn Braunstein, Chair, as well as to the members of the ATA Ethics Advisory Committee, who worked diligently to produce these very fine guidelines for ethical dilemmas in endocrine practice," says Hossein Gharib, MD, President of the ATA, Professor of Medicine, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota. "In current practice, highly sensitive to issues of multiplicity of interest, these recommendations are both timely and welcome."

Source: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News