Jaro Kotalik

• Doctor of Medicine Master of Arts in Med Ethics & Law
• Chair at Lakehead University

Striving to be faithful to the moral core of medicine and to spiritual, moral, and social teaching of the church, Catholic physicians see their role as an extension of the healing ministry of Jesus. When faced with a situation in which a large number of gravely ill people are seeking care, but optimal treatment such as ventilation in intensive care...

The Canadian medical assistance in dying (MAID) program, based on an ambitious piece of legislation and detailed regulations, has failed to provide Canadians with sufficient publicly accessible evidence to show that it is operating as mandated by the requirements of the law, regulations, and expectations of all stakeholders. The federal law that wa...

Contemporary bioethics recognizes the importance of the culture in shaping ethical issues, yet in practice, a process for ethical analysis and decision making is rarely adjusted to the culture and ethnicity of involved parties. This is of a particular concern in a health care system that is caring for a growing Aboriginal population. We raise the p...

Public health ethics deals with moral aspects of development, implementation, teaching, and research of public health. Public health practitioners have always been aware of the ethical dimension of their field, but public health ethics as a subdiscipline of bioethics has emerged only at the end of the last century, and it is still a young and unset...

Public health ethics deals with moral aspects of development, implementation, teaching, and research of public health. Public health practitioners have always been aware of the ethical dimension of their field, but public health ethics as a subdiscipline of bioethics has emerged only at the end of the last century, and it is still a young and unset...

The authors led the development of a framework for ethical decision-making for an Academic Health Sciences Centre. They understood the existing mission, vision, and values statement (MVVs) of the centre as a foundational assertion that embodies an ethical commitment of the institution. Reflecting the Patient and Family Centred Model of Care the ins...

To help family physicians achieve an ethical balance in their opioid prescribing practices. MEDLINE was searched for English-language articles published between 1985 and 2011. Most available evidence was level III. It is essential to follow practice guidelines when prescribing opioids, except when another course of action is demonstrably justified....

The political and social principle of subsidiarity can be useful as a general principle of bioethics. The principle states that only those decisions and tasks that cannot be effectively decided upon or performed by a supported or subsidized lower level authority ought to be relegated to a more central or higher authority. The concept of subsidiarit...

Objectives: To discuss whether, during an influenza pandemic, public health authorities could be ethically justified in implementing a mandatory vaccination program directed at health care professionals. Methods: Ethical analysis is carried out by examining arguments that can be made in favor or against such a mandatory measure and by seeking a rea...

In the near future, experts predict, an influenza pandemic will likely spread throughout the world. Many countries have been creating a contingency plan in order to mitigate the severe health and social consequences of such an event. Examination of the pandemic plans of Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, from an ethical perspective,...

The discrepancy between the demand for and the supply of physician's services is the result of actions of multiple parties, including physicians. This situation raises ethical challenges for physicians, because it involves the profession's core values. To discuss physicians' ethical obligations regarding the quantity of services that they might pro...

Purpose: To develop an evidence-based clinical practice guideline that would address the following questions: (a) What is the role of prophylactic cranial irradiation (PCI) in patients with limited or extensive stage small-cell lung cancer (SCLC) who have achieved complete remission in response to induction therapy (chemotherapy or chemoradiothera...

Professional caregivers have an obligation to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of all personal information given to them by their patients or clients. Such information is to be released to a party who is not participating in the care of the patient only with the express consent of the patient. The question is whether or not the express cons...

A retrospective review was carried out to study children, not more than 16 years old, with a confirmed diagnosis of medulloblastoma, who were residents of the Province of Ontario at the time of diagnosis between 1977 and 1987 inclusive. The provincial tumour registry provided the population database. One hundred and eight children with medulloblast...

Prospectively gathered information in the Ontario Cancer Foundation's computerized clinical database was analysed to provide a description of the management of 12,399 patients with unresected non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) registered at seven regional cancer centres in Ontario between 1982 and 1991. Overall, 44% received initial thoracic radiot...

Conventional fractionation in radiotherapy may not be the most optimal with respect to the cellular kinetics and radiosensitivity of the proliferating tumour cells.Some biological experiments suggest that if the interval between treatments is reduced to 3 to 8 h and irradiation given 2 to 3 times/day then the therapeutic ratio can be improved becau...

Treatment of 233 patients with metastatic cancer in the neck and an unknown primary tumor was studied. The 5 yr crude survival rate was 18%, but among patients with disease limited to the upper and midneck irradiated to 4,500 rads in 4 wk, the rate was 44%. Optimum irradiation consists of 5,500 rads in 5 wk delivered via supervoltage technique to a...