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Tom Tomlinson

Publications and source records attributed to Tom Tomlinson.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2003

Ethics, professionalism, and humanities at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

This article describes the variety of approaches used at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine for teaching ethics, professionalism, and humanities to undergraduate medical students: courses in ethics and health policy; mentoring programs; selectives in history, literature, and spirituality; structured patient care experiences; and discussions with students in their clinical years on the ethical and professional challenges confronting them in their clinical experiences. Some of these approaches, such as the structured patient-care experience, may be unique to Michigan State. The authors place special emphasis on discussing the challenges that confront this curriculum, including struggles to keep up with the pace of change in the health care system, preserving and highlighting the linkages between the "ethics" and the "professionalism" strands of the curriculum, making optimal use of Web technologies, successfully communicating to students the ultimately practical importance of the medical humanities other than ethics, and solving the problems of geography created by a widely dispersed community campus system.

Bioethics↗
PubMed2000

On being genetically "irresponsible".

New genetic technologies continue to emerge that allow us to control the genetic endowment of future children. Increasingly the claim is made that it is morally "irresponsible" for parents to fail to use such technologies when they know their possible children are at risk for a serious genetic disorder. We believe such charges are often unwarrented. Our goal in this article is to offer a careful conceptual analysis of the language of irresponsibility in an effort to encourage more care in its use. Two of our more important sub-claims are: (1) A fair judgement of genetic irresponsibility necessarily requires a thick background description of the specific reproductive choice; and (2) there is no necessary connection between an act's being morally wrong and its being irresponsible. These are distinct judgments requiring distinct justification.

Child↗
PubMed1990

Misunderstanding death on a respirator.

As Tom Tomlinson's study indicates, there is considerable misunderstanding and confusion among physicians and nurses working in the area. Brain death is often not well-understood by healthcare professionals and hence inadequately explained to relatives, leaving them confused as to whether their loved-one is alive or dead. Whilst these healthcare professionals are using whole-brain death as the criterion of death, they have no clear understanding of the definition of death which underpins the brain-death criterion. Lack of this philosophical rationale makes the use of the brain-death criterion a mere technicality, rather than the expression of a well-grounded conceptual and ethical understanding. The other difficulty is that a brain-dead respirator patient just does not look dead. This appearance of life, Tomlinson suggests, can trigger deep emotions in caregivers and family members which will compound the intellectual perplexity already felt by them.

Attitude↗