Ruolo e finalità della bioetica nella moderna medicina intensiva: il Gruppo di Studio di Bioetica della SIAARTI

Abstract

[Role and purposes of bioethics in the modern Intensive Medicine: the Bioethics Study Group SIAARTI]

The Bioethics Study Group SIAARTI was officially set up in 1999. It was established to meet a need due to the changes in Intensive Medicine caused by the continuous pharmacologic and biotechnologic development in recent years. In fact a problem was posed: to balance the new intervention possibilities and the juridical and moral responsibilities raised by their management. The main purpose of BSG consists in proposing itself as mediator of a cultural process (1) defining and understanding the moral questions raised by the changes that the whole Intensive Medicine has caused about the birth, the care and the death of human beings; (2) offering to intensivists operative tools – recommendations – to solve, in clinical practice the complicated themes above mentioned. The present article runs through the moral reflection led by BSG SIAARTI in the last years, and explains the contents of these operative tools through the definition of the theoretic setting that produced them.