Clinical and professional ethics guidelines for the practice of thyroidology

摘要

A VARIETY OF MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES have de-veloped ethics practice guidelines or position statements regarding specific ethics issues (1-6). The Endocrine Society published its Code of Ethics for practice in 2001 (1); however, none of the practice guidelines are specific to thyroidology. In the field of thyroidology, specific clinical ethics issues arise in different clinical contexts. For example, autoimmune thyroid disease raises different clinical ethics issues compared with thyroid oncology. Within thyroid oncology, each type of thyroid cancer raises unique and distinct clinical ethics issues and dilemmas. For example, the clinical ethics dilemmas that present in hereditary medullary thyroid cancer surrounding genetic screening are not the same as in thyroid cancers that are not familial or do not yet have defined germline genetic markers.