Ethics for Laboratory Medicine

Maintaining high ethical standards is a characteristic we expect in many professionals, but perhaps most in the field of medicine.  Although biomedical ethics is a relatively new field, there have been discussions of moral issues in medicine since ancient times.  The Hippocratic Oath, for instance, was written by Hippocrates at approximately 400 B.C.  It requires that a new physician swear to uphold specific ethical standards.  Over 2000 years later new physicians still swear by the Hippocratic or a similar oath. The December 2019 issue of Clinical Chemistry published a Review paper that provides a broad overview of ethics as it pertains to laboratory medicine.