Technological interventions in medicine - Ethic considerations and guidelines for the medical practice

The development and amplitude the advanced medical technologies knew in the last decades were determined by the issues that public healthcare required from medicine and also by the discoveries recorded in the medical and technological field. It is well known that the extensive usage of the medical devices generated huge benefits, translated through gained time, access to effective therapy and improvement in the quality of life. The diagnosis in medicine is almost exclusively technical, established with the help of the medical devices, their performance facilitating the comprehension of the disease as a pathologic phenomenon. Moreover, the implementation of the medical devices in the medical practice brought a significant contribution to the development of the interventional techniques, providing the possibility to heal patients in critical situations or with increased surgery risk and contributing to an improvement in the quality of life. The impact of medical technology in contemporary medicine and the ethical dimension of the debate on the priorities for the usage of these technologies in the medical practice require a wider approach on the advanced medical technology. This paper focuses on the manner in which the ethical analysis should be applied in the evaluation of advanced medical technology, even if the current trend favors a global approach on the evaluation of technology. At the basis of this discussion we intend to formulate arguments in support of the analogy between the opinions of representation of the technologic applications, gathered from the medical practice (medical staff and patients) and the medical technology (in all its instances), with the purpose to draw ethical guidelines for the technical research and development activities and for the implementation procedures in various domains of the medical practice (multi-professional and multidisciplinary).