There’s a short piece in the latest JME about the use of social networking sites by medics that’s got me thinking. In it, Guseh, Brendel and Brendel suggest that physicians need to be especially careful about accepting, say, a Facebook friend request from patients because of the nature of social networking sites and the possibility […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
And Justice (and Healthcare) for All
A convicted double murderer has won the right to have cosmetic surgery to remove a birthmark on the NHS. Good. Predictably, the foaming-at-the-mouth brigade is having a field day with this in the comments section of the Daily Fail‘s coverage. Equally predictably, they’re wrong. The reason is straightforwardly to do with considerations of rights and […]
AIDS=Nazism?
This is a very strange story that’s been picked up by the Daily Telegraph: a German Aids charity has been attacked for launching an advertising campaign – and a pretty sexually explicit one at that – in which people who spread HIV are presented as Hitler. I’m not sure whether the target is people who […]
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…
By David Hunter One thing I’ve been pondering lately is what we might use to refer to a gathering of bioethicists? […]
Salon Culture… in Manchester
I can’t remember how I found it, but I feel I ought to pimp the Manchester Salon, a debating forum in this here rainy part of the country. There seems to be a few events in coming months that are related to the concerns of this blog and journal, starting with one on assisted suicide […]
Internalising Incentives
I’ve recently been reading some work on health incentives – the kind of incentive that may be used to encourage people to pursue ostensibly desirable courses of action in return for some kind of reward (frequently monetary). Some schemes are aimed at promoting a vague healthy lifestyle, as when people are rewarded for losing weight […]
If you’re at a loose end in London…
I found myself yesterday at the Wellcome Collection, one of my favourite museums in London and somewhere I visit reasonably frequently (not being too big, and conveniently located on the Euston Road, it’s perfect to fill those odd hours between the end of the hangover and the train back to Manchester). The permanent exhibition has […]
Dan Sulmasy’s Crystal Ball
Dan Sulmasy has a piece on Bioethics Forum at the moment in which he considers the next 40 years of bioethics. It’s a curious piece, making six main claims or predictions about the future, to which I’ll return in a minute: but before that, I think it’s worth looking at his scene-setting: I suggest that bioethics […]
What’s the point of quarantine?
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 […]
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 […]