On the current state of clinical ethics

Practitioners of pain medicine and palliative care may already be quite familiar with clinical ethics, yet still uncertain about the precise nature of the field and the scope of its activities. Clinical ethics is centrally concerned with the ethics of the encounter between the healthcare professional and the patient in clinical care settings. It is thus a subset of bioethics, and distinct from research ethics and organizational ethics. The various ways of organizing teaching activities, research programs, and case consultations in clinical ethics are described and critiqued. The author describes some new and emerging ideas and practices in clinical ethics, speculates about future directions for the field, and concludes with a call for greater collaboration between practitioners of pain medicine and clinical ethicists.