By Madison K. Kilbride When prospective parents learn that they’re at risk of passing a genetic condition to their future children, they’re often very concerned. Currently, there are two ways to ensure that one’s biological children do not inherit a hereditary condition. The first is to conceive naturally, use prenatal diagnosis to test the fetus […]
Month: September 2020
Should unethical research be retracted?
By William Bülow It is no news that researchers sometimes make mistakes, or that some of us even commit fraudulent acts, such as data fabrication or falsification. Despite precautionary measures, such as careful editorial practices and peer-review, fraudulent or flawed research papers sometimes get published. When this happens, these papers should be retracted. This is […]
Does consent make open label placebo research ethical?
By Laura Specker Sullivan Open label placebo studies hypothesize that placebos can be effective even when there is complete transparency about what participants are given. These studies are being run for conditions such as chronic pain, cancer-related fatigue, and irritable bowel syndrome. Open label placebos have garnered significant interest in the popular imagination, perhaps due […]
Are children who are born without a cerebral cortex conscious?
By Anna-Karin Margareta Andersson The article highlights an important but surprisingly neglected medical ethical topic: new research suggests that children born without a cerebral cortex are conscious. What types of care should they be provided in order to respect their human rights? This topic caught my attention thanks to Professor Alan Shewmon and colleagues’ pivotal […]
Do No Harm in cancer screening programmes: can consent save the day?
By Lotte Elton Screening might harm you. That isn’t what the adverts will tell you. But, increasingly, there is a growing awareness that, for some, cancer screening might lead to unnecessary and potentially harmful investigations and treatments. This seems to violate the ethical principle of non-maleficence: the injunction that doctors ‘do no harm’ to their […]
What end of life care do we want to give to persons with end-stage dementia?
By Joseph Dimech, Emmanuel Agius, Julian C Hughes and Paul Bartolo. Dementia is a degenerative neurocognitive disorder that leads to a high level of physical and cognitive disability as the disease progresses to its end-stage. Such patients are also at high risk of suffering from co-morbidities, including aspiration pneumonia secondary to swallowing difficulties. Thus, such […]
Centring choice in birthing services; COVID-19 and maternal request caesarean sections
By Anna Nelson & Elizabeth Chloe Romanis During the COVID-19 pandemic pregnant and birthing people saw significant changes to the services they were offered. From March 2020 substantial restrictions were introduced in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus, with some notable examples including bans on partners attending scans, limitations on the number […]
How much money would it take for you to be infected with COVID-19 for research?
By Olivia Grimwade and Julian Savulescu. Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) research involves infecting otherwise healthy people with a disease in order to improve our knowledge of the disease and/or to test vaccine candidates. In the hope of halting the deaths, infections and lockdowns caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, CHIMs have been identified as […]
Would you enroll in this Covid-19 vaccine trial? — Ethical considerations for protecting the options of subjects in primary epidemic vaccine trials
By Arthur L. Caplan and Jerrold L. Abraham. We responded to the review in JME by Monrad about ethical issues in vaccine trials, in which the discussion was limited to secondary vaccine trials (i.e. testing additional vaccines after one or more vaccines have been approved). We are concerned that the ethics of ongoing primary vaccine […]
The problem in nursing homes is not Covid-19 – it is nursing homes
By Tania Moerenhout A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published a scathing article on how the pandemic was handled in Belgian nursing homes, focusing on instances where elderly were declined hospitalisation despite the fact that intensive care beds remained available. Refusing hospital care to nursing home residents was never the official policy, […]