Objectives: Hospital ethics committees increasingly affect medical care worldwide, yet there has been little evaluation of these bodies. Israel has the distinction of having ethics committees legally required by a Patients' Rights Act. We studied the development of ethics committees in this legal environment.Design: Cross-sectional national survey of general hospitals to identify all ethics committees and interview of ethics committee chairpersons.Setting: Israel five years after the passage of the Patients' Rights Act.Main measurements: Patients' rights and informal ethics committee structure and (...) function.Results: One-third of general hospitals have an ethics committee, with committees concentrated in larger facilities. Hospitals without committees tended to lack any structure to handle ethics issues. Committees tend to be interdisciplinary and gender-mixed but ethnic mix was poor. Confidentiality is the rule, however, legal liability is a concern. One-third of patients' rights ethics committees never convened and most committees had considered fewer than ten consults. Access to the consultation process and the consultation process itself varied substantially across committees. Some patients' rights ethics committees attempted to solve cases, others only rendered decisions. Informal committees often refused to consider cases within Patients' Rights Act jurisdiction.Conclusions: Despite statutory requirement, many Israeli patients and clinicians do not have access to ethics committees. The scant volume of cases shows serious discrepancies between practice and Patients' Rights Act regulations, suggesting the need for education or revision of the law. Heterogeneity in committee function demonstrates need for substantial improvement. (shrink)

For Byzantium, the XIV century was the time of its last elevation in culture, which was called "Paleologic Renaissance." His main content was "hesychast disputes", which lasted for thirty years and took frequent political forms. The main subjects of this discussion were, on the one hand, the Calabrian monk Barlaam, who came from Italy, where he received Latin education, and on the other hand, the Thessalonian Metropolitan Gregory Palam, who spoke on behalf of the Athos monks. The followers of Palami (...) received the name "Palamit". Varlaam and Palama were representatives of two opposite directions in Byzantine culture of the XIV century. - "anti-knitting" and monastic-church. (shrink)

-- vyp. 4. Opyt teoreticheskoĭ istorii -- vyp. 5. Poznavatelʹnye sredstva teoreticheskoĭ istorii -- vyp. 6. Metod teoreticheskoĭ istorii.

A discussion of the problem of contradiction in mechanical motion has been in progress for a long time in the pages of Filosofskie nauki. The attention given that problem is no accident. In our day, problems concerning contradictions involved in rest and motion, the continuous and the discontinuous, the finite and infinite, etc., have moved from the realm of abstract consideration to that of the concrete and current handling of the subject matter of modern physics, mathematics, and other fields. It (...) is natural that the present stage of knowledge of objective reality should occasion a revived interest on the part of logicians and philosophers in these problems, including the question of how objective contradictions may be expressed in scientific theories. (shrink)

The relations of such two important public institutions in Ukraine, as the state and the church, throughout national history, and especially in the era of independent state formation, have shown that they have always been a significant element of the climate formation in Ukrainian society, its spiritual potential and stability. Not always were these relations a priori constructive, but in their positive and negative ways they remained socially significant, determining the directions and tonality of many political, social and spiritual processes (...) of national history. 90s of the twentieth century. in the life of the Ukrainian society was marked by a radical change in the paradigm of being, which led to a rethinking of the whole spectrum of life-determining priorities and orientations - from political to cultural, world-view and religion. (shrink)

The paper explores the ethical and psychological issues that arise when family members request that “everything possible” be done for a particular patient. The paper first illustrates this phenomenon by reviewing the well known case of Helga Wanglie. We proceed to argue that in Wanglie and similar cases family members may request futile treatments as a means of conveying that (1) the loss of the patient is tantamount to losing a part of themselves; (2) the patient should not be abandoned (...) or disvalued in any way; or (3) the patient is owed special obligations by virtue of the special relationship in which the family and the patient stand. We maintain that families can best express these important messages by caring for patients, rather than by making requests for futile interventions. Likewise, when life-sustaining measures are futile, health providers can best fulfill their professional obligations by assuring patients' dignity and comfort, rather than by applying futile interventions. (shrink)

Biodiversity and Conservation 4: 916-928.