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 […]
Julian Sheather
Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
Julian Sheather on sexuality and a severely brain damaged partner
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, […]
Julian Sheather: Should doctors prescribe placebos?
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 […]
Julian Sheather: Neither playing God nor worshipping Her
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 […]
Julian Sheather: Why am I frightened of doctors?
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 […]
Julian Sheather: Does medicine do any good?
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 […]
Julian Sheather: Politics, genital mutilation, and the slow death of serious debate
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 […]
Julian Sheather: Pain and its uses
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 […]
Julian Sheather: Should we pay drug addicts to be sterilised?
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 […]
Julian Sheather: Whose potbelly is it anyway?
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 […]