[Do ethical guidelines provide assistance in clinical practice?].

Initially ethical guidelines in medicine were aimed at protecting the interests of trial participants. Over the last years, however, helpful guidelines for ethical decision-making and for the treatment and care of patients have gained more and more importance in clinical practice. On behalf of the Central Ethics Committee (CEC) of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS) a number of task force groups have elaborated useful ethical guidelines for clinical practice and biomedical research. The ethical guidelines issued by SAMS cannot provide precise instructions on how to act and decide in the individual case but they serve as decision-making aids in clinical practice and provide orientation in legally unregulated medical areas. Although not actually lawful, most of these guidelines are considered a binding obligation under the Rules of Professional Conduct.