Recent advances: Medical ethics

Recent advances in medical ethics? This may sound odd if your vision of medical ethics is the application to medicine of the Hippocratic oath. If, however, you believe that the goal of medical ethics is to improve the quality of patient care by identifying, analysing, and attempting to resolve the ethical problems that arise in the practice of clinical medicine,1 the concept of “recent advances” won't come as such a shock. In this article I review advances in medical ethics in five areas—end of life care, medical error, priority setting, biotechnology, and medical ethics education—and anticipate two future issues, “eHealth” and global bioethics.