[Medical ethical aspects of culture in social interactions with Muslim patients]

Abstract

In today's world, the plurality of values is considered to be a constitutive feature of modern societies. In these societies, transcultural patient-physician relationships are a part of daily medical practice. Culturally determined value systems can be crucial for understanding the perception of notions such as "health" and "illness", leading to fundamental differences in assessing medical interventions and therapeutic objectives. Therefore, transcultural conflicts of interest are presenting medical ethical decision-making with new challenges. Time and again, medical practice demonstrates that cultural differences between physician and patient are correlated with the complexity of medical ethical conflicts, as can be seen in the relationship between Muslim patients and non-Muslim physicians in the German health care system. This paper discusses some of the central issues in these relationships like communication, sense of shame, religious duties, and medical end-of-life decisions, analyzing some concrete cases. Subsequently, a number of medical ethical theses relevant for multicultural societies will be discussed.