Introduction
The contemporary health care field entails various legal and ethical dilemmas, owing to its existence at least partly to the rapid development of technologies and the digitalization of science and medicine. The content and shape of ongoing improvements in health care require careful ethical and legislative attention. This paper clarifies several instances of legal and ethical issues in health care, namely organ donation-associated, ethical issues in online psychotherapy, and concerns about artificial intelligence use in medicine.
Organ Donation
The current advances in the genome allowed for rapidly revealing genotypes of humans for human leukocyte antigens loci, which helped facilitate organ donation from non-related donors and post-mortem organ donation. According to the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, people can donate their organs at the time of death or, when applicable, during their lifetime. The law ensures that donation is executed with informed consent by adults concerning the right of privacy for donors and their families. Even though the process of organ donation has been improved over the last few decades, thousands of people continue dying every year due to the lack of donor organs. This disproportionate supply/demand ratio creates a crucial ethical issue of to whom an organ should be given (Pozgar, 2019). For instance, there is a continuous confrontation between the age of patients and disease severity, presence of psychiatric complications, or bad habits.
Online Psychotherapy
Online psychotherapy is set to become an emerging field in the global pandemic environment. Therefore, ethical challenges should be addressed to allow health care specialists and patients to decide whether to engage in this modern psychotherapy format. Despite tons of undeniable advantages of online sessions like increased availability and flexibility, economic advantages, and enhancements in communications, serious concerns still exist. There is insufficient research support for online psychotherapy and therapeutic relationship issues: many specialists doubt that effective therapy can be obtained solely through technology without conventional person-to-person communication, including eye contact and shared location. When therapy is executed across state or even national borders, issues like licensing verification and cultural differences arise (Stoll, 2020). These concerns collectively demonstrate that although online therapy provides many benefits, its effectiveness and feasibility should be further investigated to amend the ways it is executed.
Artificial Intelligence in Health Care
Artificial intelligence has become extremely widespread in all fields of life, including education, economics, technology, science, and medicine. Systemically integrating available experimentally obtained evidence helps process an enormous amount of information and facilitate decision-making n health care. The primary issue is that the emergence of algorithm-based support should not replace the involvement of a human doctor but rather support it. The idea that artificial intelligence could be more objective than human intelligence is now considered a “carefully crafted myth” (Morley, 2020). First, many existing studies in the field of artificial intelligence are made on a few samples, which leads to model overfitting and unreliable results. Secondly, there are some ethical complications; for example, the relationship between a patient and a health care professional, based on empathy and trust, might be diminished because of the over-reliance on computational methods. These and other issues are essential to address in light of the emerging implementation of artificial intelligence in healthcare.
Conclusion
Health care is a rapidly developing field in today’s world. However, with the implementation of advances, ethical and legal issues arise that need careful attention. While becoming more available, organ donation became a matter of debate regarding the justice of organ distribution. Online psychotherapy needs to be further investigated to address legal issues and ensure the effectiveness of treatment. Artificial intelligence is beneficial for many facets of contemporary life. At the same time, it provokes ethical issues requiring attention. Thus, rapid improvements in health care need to be accompanied by timely ethical and legislative support.
References
Morley, J., Machado, C. C., Burr, C., Cowls, J., Joshi, I., Taddeo, M., & Floridi, L. (2020). The ethics of AI in health care: A mapping review. Social Science & Medicine, 260, 113172.
Pozgar, G. D. (2019). Legal and ethical issues for health professionals. Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Stoll, J., Müller, J. A., & Trachsel, M. (2020). Ethical issues in online psychotherapy: A narrative review. Frontiers in psychiatry, 10, 993.