Real life showing signs of coming back under control, it’s nice to be back blogging again. Hopefully I’ll be up to speed soon. To get back into the swing of things, there’s an interesting post from Ole Martin Moen on the Practical Ethics blog. It’s only short, so I’ll reproduce almost fully here. Today, if […]
Category: Blogosphere
Philosophy on the Radio
You’re all probably way ahead of me on this, but there’s a series called The Philosopher’s Arms currently enjoying a run on Radio 4. The premise of the programme is that philosophical questions are discussed in the context of a conversation in the pub – which has, of course, been the traditional haunt of philosophers […]
Assisted Suicide and the Courts: Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
“Martin”‘s story has been generating a reasonable amount of media and blog attention over the lat few days. (Udo Schuklenk considers some of the Telegraph‘s coverage, for example, and finds it severely wanting.) Paralysed after a stroke, “Martin” wants help to end his life; but his wife doesn’t want to be the one to help […]
Reiki Research: Not Quite the Maddest thing on the Net.
Right now, physicists are pondering the fallout from the collision of high-energy particles. (Probably.) And I, for my part, am pondering the fallout from the collision of high-energy nonsense. Having had this brought to my attention, I’m led fairly quickly to this, then this, and, finally, this Mail on Sunday piece. All the links refer to […]
Conscientious Objection and What Makes a Medic
Francesca Minerva has drawn my attention to this paper by Sophie Strickland, currently available as a pre-publication download via the JME homepage, concerning conscientious objection among UK medical students. Students were invited to respond to a set of questions in an online poll to determine whether there were procedures to which they’d object, and in which […]
Three Quiet Cheers for Uterine Transplants
Charles Foster’s post over at Practical Ethics about the news of the womb-transplant surgery that’s slated to take place in the near future is on the money in many respects. Foster points out that [p]redictably the newspapers loved it. And, equally predictably, clever people from the world’s great universities queued up to be eloquently wise […]
Pratchett and Assisted Dying: A Question of Balance?
If you’ve not yet seen “Choosing to Die”, Terry Pratchett’s film about Dignitas from Monday night, I recommend that you go and watch it now. (I don’t know if it’s available outside the UK: I’m sure it’ll appear on YouTube soon, though; or, if you’re outside th UK, get a Brit to download it and […]
Medical Neutrality? The Red Cross and MSF
Adam Curtis is one of my favourite film-makers: I don’t think his programmes are always right, but they’re always provocative – and I think they’re more right than wrong. He also has a blog, which – though updated even less frequently than this one at the moment – is excellent. His latest post is about […]
A New Standard for Medics: Perfection
Lord knows why, but I keep going back to Secondhand Smoke, the pro-life, global-warmin’-denyin’, public-healthcare-hatin’, intelligent-design-lovin’, Daily-Mail-quotin’ blog written by Discovery Institute affiliated lawyer Wesley Smith. I try to stay away, but like a child peeping between his fingers while hiding his eyes, I’m just fascinated by it. A recent post concerns a Kiwi woman […]
Placentophagy, Human Milk, and the Yuck-Factor
There’s an interesting post over at Science-Based Medicine about the practice of placentophagy: that is, placenta-eating. The piece points out that, while some eat it raw, it can also be cooked; eating it raw provokes the yuck factor. Speaking personally, I’m not sure that it’s rawness makes all that much difference here – but maybe […]