Research On Ethical Issues Of The Clinical Application Of Neuroprosthetics

The problem of neuroprosthetics has more ethical issues during the development and application of neuroscience.Because the object of this technology is human brain,and the brain itself is complex and special.Various intractable neurological diseases require new medical technology urgently.Therefore,more and more scholars and experts pay attention to the development of neuroprosthetics.Neuroprosthetics is applied with the objective of curing an existing motor or sensory neural dysfunction.It can electrically stimulate myogenic regions,peripheral and central nervous systems to restore or replace damaged nervous systems,sensory organs or limb loss that helps patients those who fail to respond to other treatments to cure diseases and improve quality of life.It is a technology which has promising application prospect and provides a new perspective for humans to treat neurological and mental diseases,including cochlear implants,visual prosthesis,deep brain electrical stimulation,brain-computer interface,hippocampal prosthesis and other technologies.As a novel neural technology,neuroprosthetics has a wide range of application fields and will greatly expand the breadth and depth of clinical ethics discussion.In order to ensure the ethical life and practice of human beings and the best interests of patients in the medical process,we need to conduct ethical research on the clinical application of neuroprosthetics urgently and guide the development of neuroprosthetics in an ethical direction.Although the neuroprosthetics is only applied when the drug selection is ineffective currently.As the maturational development of this technology,its huge therapeutic prospects will accelerate the promotion of clinical applications,and the following ethical issues and challenges cannot be ignored.In order to ensure the safe and efficient development of neuroscience technology,the analysis of ethical issues is essential in the application of technology.This article discusses the general and special ethical issues faced in the development and application of neuroprosthetics,and analyzes various risk benefits and value conflicts behind them.In addition to general ethical issues which are commonly faced by new technologies such as inadequate informed consent,security risks,privacy disclosure and fair distribution of scarce resources,there are also special ethical issues related to technology such as implanted devices causing the weakening of the ability to consent,the change in autonomy and the difficulty of identifying responsibilities,and the ethical challenge on the purpose of strengthening.Facing the ethical challenges of new technologies,how to formulate relevant ethical norms to solve problems is crucial to protecting the health,well-being and rights of patients.Guided by the basic principles of bioethics,this article focuses on analyzing and researching these ethical issues,and proposes corresponding solutions to specific ethical issues encountered in the clinical practice of the technology,including paying attention to inform the substantive information and evaluate the ability to consent;evaluating autonomy and responsibility comprehensively and implementing responsibility distribution;prioritizing medical standards and avoiding the abuse of technology by strict supervision to ensure the fairness of resource allocation;adhering to the principle of confidentiality to avoid stigmatization after privacy disclosure;obtaining an acceptable risk-benefit ratio to avoid risks and increase benefits.Before the widespread application of neuroprosthetics,we can refer to these solutions to build and improve the ethical norms of the application of this technology.Based on the ethical identification of neuroprosthetics,we insist on the basic principles of bioethics and put forward suggestions for ethical governance with a hope to provide an ethical basis for formulating management practices and policies of neuroprosthetics in the future.