By Pauline Thiele In 2010 I was urged to write about our son, Liam, and submit the narrative for publication with the Journal of Medical Ethics. The three following three people, in the said order, were my greatest encouragement and support throughout the submission: Andrew Watkins (neonatologist), John Harris (the then editor-in-chief of JME/bioethicist), and […]
Month: July 2021
Demystifying a part of the Wild West of healthcare AI
By Jordan Joseph Wadden. The pace at which we can see technological developments in healthcare is truly amazing. Sometimes it almost seems like technology is moving too fast, which raises some familiar concerns about patient safety, job security, and sometimes even what it means to be human. One of the fastest growing uses of technology […]
What is Cultural Safety and how could it dissolve structural racism in the UK?
By Amali U Lokugamage Elizabeth(Liz) Rix, Tania Fleming, Tanvi Khetan, Alice Meredith, and Carolyn Ruth Hastie. The global pandemic and the BlackLivesMatter movement have highlighted systemic racism as a driver of health inequities for ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom. So how should we upend this pervasive discrimination and critically yet constructively examine this from […]
Where’s the evidence for prolife hypocrisy?
By Bruce Blackshaw, Nicholas Colgrove, Daniel Rodger. We recently published a paper entitled ‘Prolife hypocrisy: why inconsistency arguments do not matter’, which we discuss in this blog post. The paper was a general defence against inconsistency arguments: Arguments that claim prolifers only care about fetuses, not X, where X is anything critics think is worth […]
CIA exploited incarcerated Black Americans in race for “mind-control” agent
By Dana Strauss and Monnica Williams. A well-kept American secret is that the CIA-funded research that exploited incarcerated Black Americans along with other vulnerable groups in America’s hunt for a “mind-control” drug. Arising from fears that LSD could be used as a form of biochemical warfare during the cold war and that the Soviets had […]
Conscientious Non-Referral
By Samuel Reis-Dennis and Abram Brummett. The year is 1950. A married couple living in the United States bring their 12-year-old daughter to a paediatric surgeon with a concern: their daughter has been masturbating. Despite the paediatrician’s explanation that such behaviour is not abnormal or unhealthy, the parents request that the surgeon perform a clitoridectomy. […]
Food poverty and health justice
By Jess Knight. “Have you ever smoked? And what about alcohol? Anybody else at home with you? What do you do for work?” A ‘social history’ is an essential component of any medical interview, helping clinicians to understand their patients’ situation, background and the presence of any well-established social risks to health and wellbeing. Used […]
Why all self-fulfilling prophecies matter
By Mayli M. Consider Chris, an unconscious coma patient in intensive care. Suppose that, according to tests of Chris’s brain activity, he is predicted to have a ‘poor outcome’, which could be death or a prolonged disorder of consciousness like vegetative or minimally conscious state. This prognosis informs treatment decisions about this patient, specifically the […]
Split liver transplantation: Is saving more lives always the ethical option?
By Tae Wan Kim, John Roberts, Alan Strudler, and Sridhar Tayur. In 2016, the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN) and United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) posed an increasingly consequential question: Should a large liver always be split if medically safe? During a split liver transplantation (SLT), a whole human liver is divided into […]
Balancing speed and equity in the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines
By Maxwell J. Smith COVID-19 vaccines are in limited supply, and so it’s crucial that their harm-reducing powers are deployed strategically. This likely requires two things: (1) prioritizing vaccines to those at greatest risk of mortality, hospitalization, transmission, and/or infection; and (2) administering vaccinations as rapidly as possible. Yet, it is sometimes not possible to […]