Abstract
International inequities in resources have translated into inferior health care for a huge proportion of the 7 billion people living on the planet. Most energy and inroads have been made in the areas of maternal and fetal health, water quality, and HIV. But surgery is being increasingly recognized as a huge burden of disease in the developing world and increasing human and fiscal resources are being focused in this area. In spite of much well-intentioned and philanthropic efforts by neurosurgeons all over the world to help teach and capacitate neurosurgeons in resource-poor environments, a number of ethical challenges are inherent in this type of work.
In this chapter these ethical challenges are discussed with a focus on several key examples: choosing the location to help, ensuring sustainability of the teaching, avoiding mismatched expectations, the dilemma for settling for “second best,” the “white knight” syndrome, appropriate team selection, and ensuring cultural sensitivity. The reader is provided some simple recommendations for international teaching and the inherent ethical challenges.
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Bernstein, M. (2014). International Neurosurgery Collaborations. In: Ammar, A., Bernstein, M. (eds) Neurosurgical Ethics in Practice: Value-based Medicine. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54980-9_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54980-9_24
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