I’ve reached an important milestone: the first case of Pig Aids swine flu among people I know. It’s quite exciting. She’s been told to stay in, avoiding contact with others, for five days by one person, for 10 by another. I’m wondering why this is. In the early days of the illness, there might have […]
Month: July 2009
Old-School Surgical Instruments
Fascinating, but perhaps not best viewed while eating… […]
Coroners Bill Amendement thrown out.
Lord Falconer’s amendment to the Coroners Bill, which would have made specific legal provision for those helping others to travel to places like Dignitas, was rejected by the House of Lords last night. Oh, well. As Falconer admits, it’s not obvious that it’ll make all that much difference on the ground, because few, if any, […]
Cosmetic Surgery and the Purpose of Medicine
For quite a while now, I’ve had the idea that I’d like to write something about the purpose of medicine – it’s something I’ve been adding on job applications for about 5 years, but I’ve not got around to doing all that much about it yet. The question as I saw it was whether medicine […]
Snaf(l)u?
There’s been a lot of ink sneezed recently on how we should organise our response to H5N1 and, latterly, H1N1 – on questions of who should be top of the Tamiflu distribution list and on how the distribution should be organised. (To give a recent example, Dan Sokol touches on the question here.) However, one aspect […]
Swine Flu enters X-Files Territory
It was only a matter of time before people started to come up with “evidence” that swine flu is all a hoax cooked up to allow the lizard illuminati Bildeberg New World Order freemasons to take over the world… and it’s happening now – this time courtesy of someone using the same name as a BMJ […]
Get thee to the JME site to read our new medical ethics soap
For the few reprobates among our blog readers who are not regular visitors to our parent journal’s web-site I thought that I should point out that this months issue of the JME contains the first instalment of our new medical ethics “soap” Eyewitness in Erewhon academic hospital So, if you think that moral philosophy is […]
What should UK medical students learn about ethics? Your chance to have your say
The Institute of Medical Ethics is currently revising the Core Curriculum in Medical Ethics and Law. This is arguably the only document laying out in any kind of detail what medical students in the UK should learn about ethics in medical school, and is therefore not unimportant! A consultation on the revision in now open […]
Letter on Dignitas and the Coroners Bill
Rowan Williams, Vincent Nichols and Jonathan Sacks wrote to the Telegraph on Tuesday to voice opposition to the Coroners and Justice Bill currently making its way through Parliament. They allege that the amendment dealing with assisted suicide introduced by Lord Falconer (and reproduced here, on the Dignity in Dying website) is a step on the […]
More on prayer…
Wouldn’t you know it, my favourite religious commentator (and I favour one religious commentator over another in the sense that I favour a hangover over a migraine or burst aneurysm) George Pitcher has weighed into the prayer on the wards coverage. Guess what? His opinions aren’t impressive. […]