Fundamental Ethical Issues in Unnecessary Surgical Procedures

Abstract

In clinical practice performing any surgical procedure is inconsistent because all surgical procedures carry definitely some degree of risk. Worldwide every year millions of patients go under knife, but many of them are enduring great pain and shelling out thousands and dollars for surgeries they don’t really need. This review work was planned with an intention to focus attention towards it with reporting cited evidences of unnecessary surgical operations and discuss ethical issues concern with it. In present review the references search included standard citations Google scholar, MEDLINE and PUBMED. We also used Google search engine for screening various news concern with highlighting this topic in community and online media. For articles we go through more than 60 articles from worldwide and 12 news media views from Google search in last one year. We used following quotes for their search-unnecessary surgeries, second opinion, ethical issues in unnecessary surgeries. Geographical variations were also kept in view. Our intension was highlighting ethical issues concern with unnecessary surgical operations. Henceforth we excluded such work that does not concern with ethical issues. Unnecessary surgery is that which is medically unjustifiable when the risks and costs are more than the likely therapeutic benefits or relief to the patient based on the patient’s lifestyle requirements. To avoid or minimize such interventions basic seeding of ethics in curriculum and strict laws will definitely helpful in clinical practice. In conclusion, our aim was to highlight this major issue and underline need of competency based medical bioethics education in Indian scenario.

Keywords

• code of ethics
• informed consent
• malpractice