By David Hunter I’ve been considering writing a reflective piece about the general quality of bioethics papers in medical journals, focusing on how the medium (the audience and the severe word limits) impacts on the message and its quality – possibly as a bit of a moan since I’ve not yet managed to get a […]
Category: Blogosphere
Research Ethics and Ethical Problems
Noted on Ben Goldacre’s twitter feed a couple of weeks ago was this article in Slate about the recruitment of pregnant women into drug trials. Essentially, there’s a situation in which there’s a dearth of information about the impact of drugs during pregnancy. According to the article, [p]harmaceutical companies are not willing to navigate the […]
Safety First? How the Current Drug Approval System Lets Some Patients Down
Post by Julian Savulescu Cross-posted from the Practical Ethics blog, and relating to this paper in the JME. Andrew Culliford, whose story is featured in the Daily Mail, is one of the estimated 7 in 100,000 people living with Motor Neuron disease, a progressive degenerative disease which attacks muscles, leaving those affected eventually unable even to […]
Emmerich on Fitness to Practise
Having asked out loud whether anyone could explain a couple of odd FtP decisions, I got this from Nathan Emmerich, offering sociological pop at an answer… Iain wondered if anyone could explain the morality that underlies a couple of recent Fitness to Practise decisions made by the GMC. Well, more accurately he wondered if anyone […]
Not in any Way Topical.
I know, I know. I keep banging on about the irrelevance of genetics when it comes to families – about why parenthood isn’t a genetic thing. But, actually, now I think about it – Duchess of Cambridge blah blah baby blah… I wonder what, if any, constitutional implications there’d be if the heir to the […]
Are Biomedical Ethics Journals Institutionally Racist?
So there’s this letter published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry that moots the idea that the top biomedical ethics journals might be institutionally racist. In it, Subrata Chattopadhyay, Catherine Myser and Raymond De Vries point out that the editorial boards of a good number of journals are dominated by members who are located in the global North – countries officially listed as […]
A storm in an NZ tea cup – or another “controversy” like post-birth abortion
By David Hunter I thought our readers might be interested in this story which is happening in New Zealand as it has echoes of the Post-Birth abortion “debate” that occurred on this blog last year. Then as now academics have argued in an academic journal (in this case the New Zealand Medical Journal) for a […]
Italian Pop Music’s Role in Bioethical Debate
Sadly, the list entitled “Great Moments in Italian Pop” is short; but the entry that must surely be at the top is probably very near the top of the list entitled “Great Moments in All Pop”. It’s a 1972 song by Adriano Celentano. Prisencolinensinainciusol. It’s pure gibberish – a parody of what anglophone pop sounds […]
Gay Conversion “Therapy”: Might the CMF have a point?
Spoiler alert: Almost certainly not. But hear me out for a bit. The Christian Medical Fellowship blog had an article posted yesterday about what it praised as a balanced documentary concerning “sexual orientation change efforts” – gay conversion therapy to you and me – on Radio 4 on Sunday. Actually, it wasn’t a documentary – it was […]
Cochlear Implants and Minority Cultures
A bit more on the cochlear implant thing that I’ve been mentioning off and on for the past couple of months. William Mager posted a link to something a little while ago on why some members of the deaf community are against CIs. This attitude had always puzzled me. Anyway, this, by Christina Hartmann, is the […]