Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

Medical ethics challenges in the substance abuse information system

Hossein Dargahi

The first step in battling against prevention and control of a social phenomenon is to distinguish it completely and clearly. Designing the information system of substance abuse, with the aim of converting data into information and knowledge, consists a great share in prevention and control of addiction, but it is faced with challenges and problems which have unpleasant and inappropriate consequences on consumer abusers. Therefore, this article is written with the purpose of studying the medical ethics challenges of information system of substance abuse.
The present research is a review of studies. The needed information is gathered form Medline, Ovid, Elsevier, Google and Pubmed search engines and also from Police Information and Statistic Centre, Ministry of Health, and Medical Education, Welfare Organization and National drug Studies centre.
Substance abuse information system has several legal and ethical problems that if they occur, abusers will show no zest for receiving any consulting and medical services and also participating in epidemiological studies.
World Health Organization has provided a special framework in eight compasses including respect for human dignity, secrecy and privacy policy, to respond to the health information system.
Before arranging the schedule, designers and programmers of substance abuse information system should provide and codify the rules, regulations and necessary instructions to clarify and determine the legal status, in order to guarantee the secrecy and privacy policy of information.

Didactic poem in traditional medicine: the study of Avicenna's poem on medicine

Majid Nimroozi

The medical Arjuze is one of the less known works of Avicenna, a great Iranian scientist and physician, which is written didactically in Arabic. In this book, Avicenna has composed 1326 lines about a complete cycle of traditional medicine of Iran in Arabic in the form of battle cry. Didactic poetry is one of the poetry forms which its main purpose is to provide educational aims and to convey scientific terms both in literature and poetical way. Avicenna's poetry in Arjuze is simple and fluent. The medical topics are overviewed in a sketchy way and not in full details in this book. In this book, theoretical and practical medicines are explained in two specific parts.
The existence of French and English translations of Arjuze shows the value of this work for Europeans as a complete outline about medicine in that time, but there is no Persian translation of this work, available. Traditional Medicine and History of Medicine Research Centre of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences has started the translation of medical Arjuze with the aim of introducing this precious work which shows the educational pattern of traditional Iranian scientists in using didactic poetry.
The purpose of this article is to introduce the characteristics of Avicenna's Arjuze with an overview of his position in modern traditional medicine.

Treatment of experimental animals: Quran's views

Mohammad Karamai

By the ever-increasing discovery of pharmaceutical and chemical substances, their adverse effects will be considered too. To evaluate adverse effects, animals are used, and factors like standardization of species and breed, storage condition and biochemical system will be effective for animal selection. In Islamic education, animal issues are important. The principles of keeping animals, using them and prohibition of animal abuse are mentioned in this article. The information were gathered from electronic and non-electronic resources including articles and books. Based on this, the following issues need specific attention:

1- Infrastructure of rights: In Hajj and Nahl chapters of Quran (verses 18 and 49) it is mentioned that animals will bow down to God. This is the basis of animal rights.
2- Animal rights for keeping them: For this case Sheikh Tousi and martyr Saani mentioned that it is necessary for the owners to feed and water the animals enough.
3- The exploitation rights: In the Holy Quran, it is said that the power and the hygiene of the animals must be considered and it is major to exploitation.
4- Rights of animal's damages: It is advised to keep and defend the animal species and human beings are forbidden to harm and kill animals. Therefore, from Islam point of view, although animals lack the speech power, they must be treated emotionally and their owners have some responsibilities, too.

Human identification (Defining human)

Behin Araminia

The most basic research in the area of human science is the research about human beings and people, while the first introduction to the immense concept of people is facing independence towards defining this concept because we feel the instances of it every day. Lack of attention in human recognition can prevent us from reaching generalized results and therefore, will lead us to transient decisions. But in fact there are some trembling parts towards human recognition, like getting far from the definition of concept, the inseparability of living species from each other up to dismissing the reality of specie's existence, a quick glance to the challenges of extraverts, ambiguity of biological definitions (morphological, fertilization, genetical and behavioral) and also lack of logical definitions.
From our point of view, there is no pervasive criterion about humanistic living therefore, the rights and characteristics which we consider for human beings are related to the humanistic living from a philosophical view point. To attach this expansion, the philosophical human beings and its differences are incorporated into the minimal human. It is clear that there is no incorporation the same as this rule and we should overcome some steps about them, if not, this incorporation will get beyond the philosophical control of human. In a steady view, what makes a difference from human beings and other creatures is not the biological definition of them, while in the approval view sometimes this definition is the only tool to separate the people. Autonomy and free choice are the exact criterion for this recognition.

Dress code: interns' and trainees' perspective

Kiarash Aramesh

The appearance and the way a doctor is dressed has a very influential effect on the physician-patient relationship. Interns and trainees of medicine must follow the principles of professional behavior as they play a crucial role during their education. The aim of this research is to analyze the interns and trainee's point of view towards dress code.
In this study, after preparing a questionnaire and assessing its validity and reliability, it was sent to 337 interns and trainees of universities of medical sciences, at Shariati, Imam Khomaini and Sina hospitals, which are selected by portion method, after ward their viewpoints were analyzed from 5 dimensions.
One hundred and seventy seven students (52.5%) and seventy students (20.8%) got mean score and high score of physical features respectively.. Two hundred and sixteen students (64.1%) and fifty four students (16%) got mean and high score of dress code respectively. One hundred and eighty eight students (55.8%) and seventy five students (22.3%) got mean and high marks in make up respectively. Two hundred and twenty three students (66.2%)were completely in favor of observing personal hygiene while one hundred and fourteen students (33.8%) just agreed with this issue. Finally, in the total physical features and dress code, 210 students (62.3%) got the average mark and 58 students (17.2%) earned high mark. Interns and trainee's viewpoints about the physical features had a significant correlation with age, sex, and educational level (P<0.05).
The results of this study shows that teaching the importance of physical feature and professional dress code is the most important action to boost the level of compliance about appearance by interns and trainees. Compiling the professional dress code can help getting this aim come true.

Patients’ satisfaction: nurses' perspective

Easa Mohammadi

Although there is no more propensity for measuring patient's satisfaction as an important qualitative scale of health services, the thing which is slightly seems to be forgotten is the attention towards the concept and expansion of theory framework. The purpose of this study is to remark the meaning of satisfaction and to offer a qualitative definition for that. This research is a qualitative study and content analysis. During the study period fifteen patients who were hospitalized in Semnan hospitals (2009) were selected. The data were gathered by half-structured interview and analyzed. The results of this study shows four two major themes and four subthemes including feeling of satisfaction and the reception of nurses by patients. Accordingly, satisfaction is a calm sense that the patient feels it after the emotional and logical reception of nurses. The feeling will be sensed by intelligent and sometimes emotional feeling of patient towards the nurse in his/her care unit environment. The results of this study indicate the real and basic meaning of patient's satisfaction from nurses' views. This meaning is even beyond the imagination of experts and managers. These results can be put into work for designing suitable tools to measure the scale of patients' satisfaction of nurses based on their real perception.

Surrogacy: infertile women's attitude

Nazanin Zia Sheikholeslami

Surrogacy is considered as one of the selective methods for infertile women especially those who don't have womb. As this method is controversial and the sides should be analyzed both ethically and legally, the purpose of this study is to scrutinize the attitude of infertile women who visit Hazrat Masoumeh Infertility Centre in Qom for surrogacy.
This cross-sectional study conducted on 300 infertile women. The information were gathered from a two part questionnaire which in one part there was personal information and the other part was for phrases related to attitudes. The earned data were analyzed by descriptive test analysis and P<0.05 was considered significant.
The results showed that 61.3% of infertile women were in favor of surrogacy and 38.7% were against it. The highest priority in terms of attitude was the fear of an emotional relationship between the surrogate mother and the baby, and also the problems of delivering the baby from surrogate mother to the applicant couple. There was a logical statistical relation between the infertile women's attitude and age, educational level of the woman, educational level, the educational level of infertile women's partners, years of infertility and income of the bread winner( P<0.05).
As the attitude of vast majority of the study samples was positive and as it is important to know about opinions and preferences of families to make this action lawful, wider investigations in this field in more variable groups is recommended.

Students' rights in teaching system

Amirahmad Shojaei

According to the professional definition of ethics, ethics is a sustainable and steady way of communication based on rights of both sides and also professional ethics is to know and act to your ethical responsibilities that every real or legal person has to others. Therefore, one of the measures of the ethicality of a university is students rights and we can count those rights to find the ethical responsibilities.
From the very beginning of entering to the university and even when the student is admitted, he/she has rights which some of them are related to the educational system. (Of course the other parts are related to the environment, including family, friends, professors, different branches of university and totally other elements of society which are not the concern of this article). Students rights can be divided into two types: the first type is those rights which have been changed into rules and are in the form of regulations and instructions and need to be followed. The other type is those rights which are not official yet and they are just some ethical principles. These rights are called ethical responsibilities and in this article we deal with these responsibilities towards students. Therefore, it is necessary to know the students rightsin the educational system and they can be the basis of many ethical judgments for the university.
Students rights are not just related to the educational system and they surround other parts of university and society as well, but the students rights in the educational system have a straight relation to his/her learning and scientific development, so those are considered as the the most important rights of students and acting to them is also very crucial.
By counting the students rights in the educational system, the university would be aware of its duties practically and it will be the first step of implementation of ethics in the university. Total duties of university and educational system towards student's rights are as following:

1- To recognize the students right.
2- To comply and show sensitivity to the students rights.
3- To comply the characters
4- Make restitution for lack of compliance.

If we look at the students rights from the university's point of view, then we should consider the duties of university all based on professional principles which are like Copernican Revolution. According to this: "others have rights and we have duties." i.e. for determining the educational duties of universities towards the students, we should first consider the students rights and then the duties of the university.