5 Real Ethical Dilemmas That Sound Straight Out Of Movies

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Doctors Are Unsure About What To Do With "Do Not Resuscitate" Tattoos

Do you have tattoos? Barbed wire on the bicep, little butterfly on the ankle, maybe "No ragrets" on the back of your head? Whatever it is, we're betting that none of your ink has thrown the entire medical world into question. That's what happens when doctors discover tattoos reading "Do Not Resuscitate" on a patient. This gives medical personnel the unenviable task of determining whether the tattoo is meant as a legally binding life and death order or simply as a bad joke. Don't laugh -- and not just because it's not funny -- joke DNR tattoos are an actual thing. One guy got the tattoo because he lost a bet, but fortunately, his paperwork confirmed that he did, in fact, want to live when he was hospitalized in 2012.

In 2017, a 70-year-old man was admitted to a hospital unconscious, in septic shock, and lacking any identification. The only thing he had was that pesky DNR tattoo. His doctors had to call in an ethics consultant, who determined that the tattoo could indeed be interpreted as the patient's genuine wish. But the issue remains controversial in the exciting world of medical ethics.

A patient's family could theoretically sue a physician who let their loved one die based on some bad ink, but then, a patient could theoretically wake up and sue once they found out their DNR was violated. Something to keep in mind before you take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical student loans: You could theoretically be ruined by a dumb joke tattoo.

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Separating Conjoined Twins Is Both A Legal And Religious Mess

In the year 2000, a 34-year-old woman from the Maltese island of Gojo was pregnant with conjoined twins, Jodie and Mary, attached at the pelvis by fused spinal cords. Jodie had developed a healthy brain, heart, and lungs capable of supporting herself, but Mary hadn't developed any of them properly, and relied on Jodie's to survive. It's kind of like when your shiftless brother shows up to crash on your couch, except somehow even sadder.

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A State Legislator Was Charged With Sexual Abuse For Having Sex With His Aging Wife

In May of 2014, Iowa State Representative Henry Rayhons visited his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife Donna at the nursing home where she lived. According to him, she was upset because she'd been moved from a private to a shared room earlier that day, and he spent his visit calming her with hand-holding and prayer. Her new roommate had a different interpretation of the evening's events, claiming that Henry entered the room, closed the privacy curtain, had sex with Donna, and then exited into the hallway. A security tape showed him tossing a pair of panties into a hamper, and his semen was later identified in her bed. Normally, what goes on in the marital bed is between a couple and their gimp, but Donna's doctor had previously directed Rayhons to cease sexual activity, having judged that she lacked the mental capacity to consent. A few weeks later, Donna Rayhons passed away, and Henry Rayhons was arrested immediately after her funeral for third-degree sexual abuse.

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Attorney-Client Privilege Is Great ... Until An Innocent Man Spends Life In Prison Because Of It

In 1982, Andrew Wilson shot and killed a security guard while robbing a Chicago McDonald's, because people who have a good sense of risk versus reward don't hold up drive-thrus in the first place. Fortunately for him, eyewitnesses identified the killer as a man named Alton Logan, who was sentenced to life in prison. It's not like things totally worked out for Wilson, as he was being held for killing two police officers in an apparently unrelated incident at the time. But he just didn't need that on top of everything else, you know?

Illinois Department of CorrectionsPictured: Logan (Left) looking absolutely nothing like Wilson (Right)

Now, Wilson had admitted as much to his two lawyers, secure in the knowledge that attorney-client privilege prevented them from telling anyone. The attorneys attended Logan's sentencing, reasoning that if the falsely accused man were sentenced to death for the crime, they'd be free to violate privilege in order to save a man's life. But no such luck. For the first time in history, it was a bad thing that an innocent man was not sentenced to die.

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Medical Researchers Sometimes Deny People Lifesaving Treatment In The Name of Science

With any new drug, there's a testing phase that usually consists of clinical trials, wherein one group is given the real medication while another is given a placebo that does nothing. Now, here's where things get complicated: Western standards of care prohibit anything but the approved treatment for HIV-positive pregnant women, even in the context of a clinical trial. So U.S. researchers instead take their trials to places like Malawi, reasoning that many women there wouldn't receive any treatment otherwise, and we kind of have to do trials to figure out if these drugs work on pregnant women.

But it doesn't feel entirely moral to deny effective, established treatments to such vulnerable populations, especially when we refuse to deny those treatments to more, uh .... "Western" patients. But then again, there might be an even more effective treatment out there, and we have no way of finding out besides putting those extremely vulnerable people at risk in the first place.

aryfahmed/Adobe StockThis positive involves a lot of negatives.