I was at a conference on doctors and social media recently, sharing a platform with the GMC. The organisers put up some darkly funny tweets by doctors at the ends […]
Julian Sheather
Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
Julian Sheather: Francis—the ethical challenge
Medical ethics has positioned itself as a decision making tool, a philosophical spanner if you like in the clinician’s toolbox. For understandable reasons it has concentrated on practical dilemmas: even […]
Julian Sheather: Is psychiatry a form of torture?
I doubt few areas of medical practice are more ethically charged than the forced treatment of people with mental disorders. Recently a colleague forwarded me some comments made in March […]
Julian Sheather: Should doctors treat violent or abusive patients?
During the years I have been talking to doctors about medical ethics, I have often heard it said that when push comes to shove, the rights dice are loaded in […]
Julian Sheather: On living to be a hundred
A gamesome piece by Garrison Keillor in this month’s Prospect on, dare I say it, the prospect of living to be 100 and what it might mean to him. It […]
Julian Sheather: Should I sign him off sick?
Thou shalt not judge. A GP asked me recently whether he should sign patients off sick when he thought they were swinging the lead. I talk to a lot of […]
Julian Sheather: Should doctors make moral judgments about their patients?
Thou shalt not judge. There are times when it feels like our eleventh commandment. In our liberal, offence-free world there are supposed to be no good and bad choices, no […]
Julian Sheather: On death, dying, and “Departures”
Dead bodies do not seem to have a place in the modern world. Death, dying, the dead—if they can be so unceremoniously bundled together—lie in our culture somewhere between the […]
Julian Sheather: Medicine, Strasbourg, and conscientious objection
The media made quite a fuss recently about the European Court of Human Rights finding that British Airways had unfairly discriminated against an employee, Mrs Eweida, in refusing to let […]
Julian Sheather: On doughnuts, moral desert, and paying for our health
I am writing this on an early train to Manchester. Not a bad time to see what people enjoy for breakfast. The woman opposite is eating one of those lovely […]