[Cognition on demand?--The wish for cognition-enhancing drugs in medicine].
OBJECTIVE
Due to recent advances in psychopharmacology, a large variety of drugs can be offered that intend to improve one's mood, memory and executive functions. These offers seem to meet the wishes and needs of people striving for enhancement of their mental capacities. How should medicine deal with these wishes? And, especially, what criteria might serve a physician's decision-making?


OBJECTIVE
As shown in the following, this decision-making process cannot be convincingly informed by criteria drawing on the distinction between 'enhancement' and 'treatment' or on certain concepts of disease, normality or medicine. Instead, a decision-making model will be developed which builds on the traditional criteria of a physician's practice: the criteria of benevolence, non-maleficence, and autonomy.


CONCLUSIONS
By means of this model, a new concept of "medicine-on-demand" will be suggested: a subjective medicine with a physician's recommendation and veto right.
Synofzik
Matthis
M
Institute fur Ethik und Geschichte in der Medizin, Schleichstrabe 8, 72074 Tubingen, Germany. M.Synofzik@gmx.de
D024803:Biomedical Enhancement / Q000941:ethics; D003071:Cognition / Q000187:drug effects*; D003657:Decision Making; D004194:Disease; D006040:Goals; D006262:Health; D006801:Humans; D008511:Medicine; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D018697:Nootropic Agents; D010820:Physicians; D011619:Psychotropic Drugs; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000941:ethics; D013812:Therapeutics / Q000941:ethics
D018697:Nootropic Agents; D011619:Psychotropic Drugs