Seriously! Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics has published a paper with a hundred and ninety-eight listed authors! I’ve always been slightly puzzled by multi-authored papers – by just how many people get to add their names to a piece of work. A friend of mine who is a proper scientist once tried to explain how it works in […]
Month: October 2012
Book Review: Tom Koch, “Thieves of Virtue: When Bioethics Stole Medicine
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012; 352 + xx pp Guest Post by Robert Rivers (PhD student, Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Program, University of British Columbia) Who benefits presenting scarcity as a natural state in health care? Who killed the Hippocratic Oath? Why are doctors portrayed as paternalistic? Why has patient care become a secondary concern to […]
Modesty, Conscience, and What it Takes to be a Doctor (with a bit of Comedy)
Two apparently unrelated new and new-ish papers in the JME have caught my eye over the last few days. One of them is this one: Salilah Saidun’s “Photographing Human Subjects in Biomedical Disciplines: An Islamic Perspective”. We’ll come to the other in a little while. There’s a couple of puzzling things about the paper. One is […]
Junk food feeders are criminal child abusers? Really?
By David Hunter Public Service Announcement: Sensitivity Advisory Sticker – Caution Post contains sarcasm. In the interests of our more sensitive readers not taking offence I recommend they skip this post on the grounds that it will contain gentle sarcasm, disagreement and a certain amount of me asking “Is that really what they mean to […]
William Mager is having a Cochlear Implant.
And he’s going to blog about the experience. On Tuesday 6th November at around 7.30am I’ll be in a hospital room while a surgeon uses a marker pen to draw a line behind my ear. Soon after that, I’ll be wheeled into an operating theatre where they’ll make a small incision behind my ear, following […]
Mouse Eggs: A Cool Solution to a First-World Problem?
The news that Japanese researchers have successfully induced skin cells to behave like viable eggs, which have then been fertilised to create a new generation of mice, may well come to be seen as a scientific milestone. And if it’s not that, it’s definitely very, very cool. (The original paper is here.) Though the research […]
Passive Euthanasia: A Cri de Cœur
Don’t worry: this isn’t another instance of me yammering on about the right to die or the right to induce death. I’ve recently received a parcel; it contained a copy of this book by Leanne Bell, which happened to fall open at p 204. On that page, you’ll find this passage: Active euthanasia involves a deliberate act […]
In Defence of Live Tweeting
Questions to which the Answer is Eh? What are you on about? No, really: what?, part 2: Should people who live-tweet conferences be thrown out and barred from future conferences? A story in IHE that concerned a debate (well, I say “debate”, but it was clearly a slow news day…) about the rights and wrongs of live-tweeting […]
But what if you Don’t Want to be Regulated?
The Malaysian Parliament has just approved a law about traditional medicine. The Traditional and Complementary Medicine Act is largely about the regulation of practitioners of TCM – notably, setting up a regulatory Council. According to section II (5) The Council shall have the following functions: (a) to advise the Minister on matters of national policy relating […]