Bioethics basic principles applied to health economics and medical audit

Abstract

This paper is a historic review of the reasons why society has responded to abuses within the medical practice and research, in the second half of the twentieth century. This reaction led to the creation of a new discipline, a bridge between the biological and ethical sense, which became to be known as “Bioethics”. We walked through the path that started at the Nuremberg trial, after the Second World War, and finished during the acclamation, by 190 countries, of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights of UNESCO, in its General Conference, in Paris, 2005. We performed a quick review of medical dilemmas arising from the intense technological development, experienced by medical science, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and examined the importance of the knowledge of Bioethics in decision making, on a day-to-day routine of a health economist or an auditing physician.