The teaching of Bioethics and the decision making: impacts at medical students

DOI: 10.15343/0104-7809.2013371915

Abstract

The evolution and consolidation of the Bioethics discipline after four decades of development and expansion throughout the world along with the Biotechnology development and the increasingly complex human relationships that started to question about the limits of the beginning and the end of life in relation to the technology advancements, and even to the limits of the Humankind concept. In that way a new Science is consolidated, being able to be replicated and taught. However, how effective the teaching of Bioethics is? In its current epistemological state of development, has the teaching of Bioethics been contributing to the training of professional staff that will be dealing with bioethics dilemmas in a daily basis? Within this context, this paper seeks to understand the impacts that the teaching of bioethics has over Medicine students, considering analysis in the 1st, 6th an 9th semesters of the undergraduate course. The statistical results obtained and presented in this paper show that, despite the great development and dissemination of Bioethics, its impact over the training of the new generation of doctors seems to be low, so that the interdisciplinary relationship particular of the discipline, the epistomological influence is still a one-way route, meaning that even if Medicine contributes to the formulation of Bioethics, Bioethics seems to be of little relevance when contributing to the formation of modern medicine, as observed in data that show strong corporatism among students. It should be noted, however, that there are results showing instability in the opinions that permit to affirm that Bioethics make chance to the doubt, avoiding dogmas and pre-conceived decisions to be formulated in an ethic dilemma situation.