Chapter 1- Ethics and Professionalismm A linear electron accelerator for therape

Question

Chapter 1- Ethics and Professionalismm A linear electron accelerator for therapeutic use was built as a dual-mode system that could either produce X-rays or electron beams. It had been in successful use for some time, but every now and then some patients received high overdoses, resulting in painful after-effects and several deaths. One patient on a repeat visit experienced great pain, but the remotely located operator was unaware of any problem because of lack of communication between them: The intercom was broken, and the video monitor had been unplugged. There also was no way for the patient to exit the examination chamber without help from the out- side, and hence the hospital was partly at fault. On cursory examination of the machine, the manufacturer insisted that the computerized and automatic control system could not possibly have malfunctioned and that no one should spread unproven and potentially libelous information about the design. It was the painstaking, day-and-night effort of the hospital's physicist that finally traced the problem to a soft-ware error introduced by the manufacturer's efforts to make the machine more user friendly Identify the following elements of the described problem and provide explanations. a. Moral values b. Issues c. Dilemmas N. B. Leveson and C. Turner, "'An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents," Computer (IEEE, July 1993), 18-41.

Explanation / Answer

Moral Values - This is one of the most important qualities that should be present when the discussion is regarding healthcare because the individuals using the liner electron accelerator should be aware of the right and wrong of the system because that is very much important from the humanity perspective. If the use of such a device is unethical then it is better not to use it to treat patients because there are instances when patients have felt pain and in repeat visits the pain has increased to quite some extent which proves that it may be causing some permanent damage which affects some part of the patient's body.

Issues - The issue here is very clear, the linear electron accelerator which is in use successfully for sometime is causing some issues to patients where the patients have felt pain, had experienced overdose and in some cases it has led to death. So the magnitude of the issue is no more low instead it can be considered to be very high in some instances and therefore the management has to think about the use of this item because this cannot go on at a regular basis.

Dilemmas - The dilemma is regarding the actual cause of the issue because initially it was thought that there is some design issue which leads to the malfunction of the device in some cases but after a thorough inspection of the device, the manufacture stated that this is not the case. There were a lot of speculations regarding the issue and finally after a lot of effort by a hospital physicist it was determined that there is a software error in the system and this software was used in order to make the process more user friendly, therefore the manufacturer included the software which needs to be removed or atheist checked in order to get rid of the issues.

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