Pain in hemodialysis

Abstract

Medical ethics can no longer be regarded as a dessert in the lunch of medical education. Physicians must no longer be educated as technical geniuses and moral imbeciles. More important, bioethics can no longer be left to the medical profession, as medical ethics is not restricted to physician ethics. The topic of pain ethics is inside this syllogism. An ethics code for pain recently published is the expression and the consequence of the importance of how the pain itself acts on a scientific, social, economical, religious and political level. It underlines that pain must be considered as a disease with its own rights and ethics call. In hemodialysis patients with pain the problem is reinforced in its resolution. The three cases collected here, painful osteoarticular calcifications, body without arms, spina bifida syndrome in a woman, biological sister of her mother, are designed to urge the students and the physicians, namely the Nephrologists, to struggle with the social and ethical impact of decisions made in the media context. Although the three cases are ethically exotic, they also deal with the more ordinary, and therefore more important, problem of everyday Nephrology. (Bioethics)