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Julian Sheather

Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.

Julian Sheather on public health: complex problems, simple truths – the case of Sebastian Kneipp

July 20, 2010

Near universal consensus then that we are in the grip of a public health disaster. Daily the evidence mounts: obesity, smoking, alcohol abuse, our very lives are killing us. And […]

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Julian Sheather on sexuality and a severely brain damaged partner

July 13, 2010

Difficult cases may make bad law, but they can also be a powerful stimulus for thought. A problem may be a candle, as the French writer Paul Valéry put it, […]

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Guest writers, Julian Sheather5 Comments

Julian Sheather: Should doctors prescribe placebos?

July 7, 2010

With considerable media fanfare the BMA has declared its opposition to the NHS providing homeopathic remedies. Not entirely a surprise, given the BMA’s explicit support for evidence-based medicine. The consensus […]

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Julian Sheather3 Comments

Julian Sheather: Neither playing God nor worshipping Her

June 24, 2010

And so scientists have succeeded in creating life in a test-tube. Hey ho. Another day, another biotech Rubicon behind us. But before we finally succumb to miracle fatigue it might […]

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Julian Sheather: Why am I frightened of doctors?

June 18, 2010

Reader I am not a shrinking violet, not a wuss or a whimp. When friends seek to describe me, pusillanimous is not the first adjective they choose. For all its […]

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Guest writers, Julian Sheather2 Comments

Julian Sheather: Does medicine do any good?

June 11, 2010

Am I alone in feeling that faint thrill in the air, the thrill that comes in the interregnum between the expectation of pain and its arrival? There’ s probably a […]

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Julian Sheather1 Comment

Julian Sheather: Politics, genital mutilation, and the slow death of serious debate

May 26, 2010

Asked his opinion on the political issues of the day, Saul Bellow, the American novelist, would sometimes say that he was in favour of all the good things and opposed […]

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Julian Sheather2 Comments

Julian Sheather: Pain and its uses

May 20, 2010

I am a terrible coward. I flee pain as the gazelle flees the lion. On a bad day I am living proof of Jeremy Bentham’s universal dictum: that the sole […]

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Julian Sheather: Should we pay drug addicts to be sterilised?

May 6, 2010

Barbara Harris is a concerned American. After adopting four children from a crack-addicted mother, she tried to change the law in California. She wanted to make it mandatory for every […]

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Julian Sheather: Whose potbelly is it anyway?

April 29, 2010

I have just been to a lecture – whose title I’ve stolen for this blog – given by Inez de Beaufort, Professor of Healthcare Ethics at the Erasmus Medical Centre […]

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