Medical moral dilemmas (2nd conditionals)

Student A
Match this sentence ending to one of the situations below
…would you (a) choose a boy, (b) choose a girl, (c) leave it up to chance, or (d) leave it up to chance for the first baby and then choose the gender of the second child.

1. If you had a new drug that you knew was important and safe but could not get permission to test it on humans,
2. If you could clone a dead famous person,
3. If you could choose the sex of your baby,
4. If everyone else was using genetic manipulation to make sure their babies were tall, strong, clever and healthy,
5. If you had developed a drug that had a 1 in a million chance of killing people who took it but made the lives of the other 999,999 people much happier,
6. If you could be offered cheaper health insurance if you showed the insurance company the results of your genetic test,
7. If you knew your company had a better drug than any of its competitors but all the other companies were offering doctors illegal gifts and bribes,
8. If you found out your company had hidden some negative test results about one of its drugs before it was approved,
9. If you knew that the only drug that could help a specific patient was illegal in the country you were in,
10. If you knew that the advice a doctor had given someone was wrong,
11. If you had the choice between prescribing a possibly dangerous drug or just letting someone die slowly,
Make up options for the other sentences. Circle which answer you think your partner will give, then ask them the questions and check.

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Medical moral dilemmas worksheets (Second conditionals)
Student B
Match this sentence ending to one of the situations below
…would you (a) pretend you were ill on the day of the meeting, (b) tell the truth, (c) refuse to answer the question, (d) lie, or (e) not lie but avoid telling the truth for as long as possible?

1. If you knew that a patient has nothing really wrong with them but the placebo effect of giving them a drug would make them feel better,
2. If a child came into a hospital asking for treatment but asked that no one told their parents,
3. If someone you knew refused to go to the doctor and asked you for medical advice instead,
4. If you knew you could save more lives by working 80 or 90 hours a week but would ruin your own health,
5. If your boss asked you not to tell one important piece of information to the drug regulation authority,
6. If you had access to some drugs in the lab that hadn’t yet been approved but you were sure could help someone in your family,
7. If a family had 5 daughters and no sons asked you to help them guarantee a son next time,
8. If you could prescribe a treatment that could keep someone alive for another couple of weeks but would leave their family with severe financial difficulties,
9. If a heroin addict asked you for clean needles to inject themselves with,
10. If you, your wife and your first child were all deaf and you could choose whether your next child would have deafness gene changed or not

Make up options for the other sentences. Circle which answer you think your partner will give, then ask them the questions and check.

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Related pages

Second conditional page

Medical English page