Medical ethics in Poland

The work related to medical ethics written by Polish authors are reviewed and some topics concerning teaching and various other activities in this field are presented. The attention is centered on the opinions and attitudes concerning the essence of medical profession and the personal model of the physician, doctor-patient relationship (including duties of the doctor), medical research on humans, abortion and other problems. The role of medico-ethical tradition in Poland is described. Main trends in polish ethical thought in relation to medicine are taken into consideration. General aspects of medical ethics in present-day Poland are tentatively characterized.     

Crossed categorization outside the lab: Findings from a factorial survey experiment

Crossed categorization studies investigate intergroup attitudes in situations when two categorization dimensions are simultaneously salient, often looking at artificial groups in laboratory settings. The current study tests (a) patterns of evaluation in crossed categorization scenarios when more than two real-life categorization dimensions are crossed, and (b) the moderating role of identity importance. We conduct a factorial survey experiment with a diverse sample (N = 524), crossing eight categorization dimensions. The results provide strong support for the additive pattern of crossed categorization, challenging the view that with an increased number of categories category-based information processing will not be used. Identity importance predicts the strength of intergroup bias only on the dimension of religion, which was the dominant dimension in this sample. The study contributes to multiple and crossed categorization literature by testing some of its key assumptions using a design that increases the ecological validity of the findings.     

Provider quality and barriers to care for transgender people: An analysis of data from the Wisconsin transgender community health assessment

Background: Transgender people in the United States often lack access to high-quality health care.

Methods: A group of researchers and transgender people came together in a community-based participatory research process to survey transgender Wisconsinites about their health care experiences. A multiple regression analysis of survey data was used to evaluate the association between barriers to health care, gender identity, and quality of medical and mental health care provider.

Results: Seventy-seven respondents were included in this analysis. Transmasculine respondents were more likely than transfeminine respondents to report barriers to high-quality health care, but having a high-quality medical or mental health care provider was associated with reporting fewer barriers to care across the entire sample.

Discussion: This community-based study suggests that health care providers play a key role in facilitating access to care for transgender Wisconsinites in the USA.     

To let hair be,or to not let hair be? Gender and body hair removal practices in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Research and anecdotal evidence suggest women continue to remove body hair, and there is some evidence for cultural changes in men's hair removal practices. This paper reports on data collected using an online mix-methods survey from 584 New Zealanders between the ages of 18–35 (mean age 26, 48.9% male, 50.6% female). The data demonstrated that substantial proportions of both women and men in Aotearoa/New Zealand remove body hair from many sites. However, gendered differences remain, and a key dimension of gendered difference appears in the concept of flexible choice around body hair removal or retention. This was seen in the difference between perceived acceptability of having body hair (81% for men, 11% for women). These findings suggest that although men, like women, are now coming under some pressure to remove body hair, there is still a great difference in men and women's capacity to choose whether to bow to it.     

Do you feel happy when other members look happy? Moderating effect of community-level social capital on interconnection of happiness

One's happiness is expected to be affected by the happiness of surrounding others. This socio-psychological nature of happiness, however, has not been fully examined in the literature of social psychology. The current study examined if this “psychological interconnection of happiness” occurs when (i) individuals have strong personal social capital and/or (ii) individuals belong to a community where other members have strong social capital. We analysed a large social survey dataset sampled from 408 communities in Japan (N = 7295). The psychological interconnection of happiness was measured by calculating the correlation between individual happiness and perceived community happiness. The multilevel analyses revealed that the psychological interconnection of happiness was moderated by community-level social capital above and beyond individual-level social capital, while individual-level social capital did not have a significant moderation effect.     

Protection of animal research subjects

The use of experimental animals, mostly rodents, in biomedical research and especially in oncology and immunology should be acknowledged with respect, recognizing the contribution of animal experimentation in the fascinating scientific progress in these disciplines of research. It is an obligation of the investigator to justify the scientific and ethical aspects of each study requiring the use of animals. The international guiding principles for using animals in biomedical research are well defined and have been distributed worldwide by the International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) since 1956, when this Organization was founded. In Poland the ICLAS philosophy and principles are highly respected and were implemented firstly by the members of the Commission on Biology of Experimental Animals appointed in 1962 by the Department of Medical Science of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. Animal Protection Acts, first proclaimed in 1928 were gradually modified and improved. Actual legislation (enacted in 1997, 2003 and 2005) is consistent with EU Directives (86/609/EEC) and follows the internationally recommended principles that include ICLAS guidelines concerning animal welfare and care condition in biomedical research. The problem of “alternative methods” is briefly discussed. Dr. Donald Boisvert, CCAC — Canadian Council on Animal Care A lecture on the subject of this paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference entitled ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005. The author is the National Representative of Polish Academy of Science to the International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) and a Member of the ICLAS Governing Board.     

Experimentation on humans and nonhumans

In this article, I argue that it is wrong to conduct any experiment on a nonhuman which we would regard as immoral were it to be conducted on a human, because such experimentation violates the basic moral rights of sentient beings. After distinguishing the rights approach from the utilitarian approach, I delineate basic concepts. I then raise the classic “argument from marginal cases” against those who support experimentation on nonhumans but not on humans. After next replying to six important objections against that argument, I contend that moral agents are logically required to accord basic moral rights to every sentient being. I conclude by providing criteria for distinguishing ethical from unethical experimentation.     

Measuring Religiosity of East Asians: Multiple Religious Belonging,Believing, and Practicing

Social surveys normally assume that respondents adhere to a single religious faith in belonging, believing, and practicing congruently. Some surveys even take religious identity as the singular measure of religiosity and examine its relationship with other variables. This practice, however, fails to capture nonexclusive and hybrid religiosity, which is arguably the traditional and normal pattern in East Asia while becoming increasingly common in the West. We have developed a new set of survey questions and conducted a survey among East Asian international students at an American university. The findings show that multiple religious belonging, believing, and practicing are quite common, the level of believing and participating in religions varies substantially, and no confession-based single measure of religious identity or practice is sufficient for measuring religiosity. We recommend this set of improved measures of religiosity be adopted in future surveys in East Asia and probably in the West as well.     

Survey Zoroastrians: Online Religious Identification in the Islamic Republic of Iran

This article contributes to the internationalization of survey methodology by discussing a case from a totalitarian state, the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2020, GAMAAN (The Group for Measuring and Analyzing Attitudes in Iran) conducted an online survey on religion. The survey had 50,000 participants, around 90 percent of whom lived in Iran. This article discusses the result that, after weighting, 8 percent identified as Zoroastrian—many times the number of Zoroastrians as recorded by scholarship on Iranian Zoroastrianism. We dub this phenomenon “Survey Zoroastrianism” and offer an explanation for this finding. After describing the position of Zoroastrianism in modern Iran and adding two further online surveys conducted by GAMAAN in 2022, we discuss the Survey Zoroastrians’ demographics and their religious and political views. The analysis shows that participating in surveys beyond the government's control provided affordances for performing alternative identity aspirations tied to notions of nationalism and civilizational heritage.