Two apparently unrelated new and new-ish papers in the JME have caught my eye over the last few days. One of them is this one: Salilah Saidun’s “Photographing Human Subjects in Biomedical Disciplines: An Islamic Perspective”. We’ll come to the other in a little while. There’s a couple of puzzling things about the paper. One is […]
Category: clinical ethics
Religious Preferences and the Best Interests of the Child
So the JME has – finally – published the paper by Brierley et al concerning withholding and withdrawal of futile treatment from children in the face of doctrinally-informed objections by the parents. It’s taken a while, but it’s there now. The essence of the paper’s claim is pretty simply put: if parental preferences run contrary to […]
CONF & CFP: 9th International Conference on Clinical Ethics Consultation
From Ralf Jox (Munich) Call for Abstracts: “Clinical ethics: bridging clinical medicine and ethics”. The Ninth International Conference on Clinical Ethics Consultation (ICCEC) 2013 will take place in Munich, Germany. The conference’s intention is to strengthen the bridge between clinical medicine and ethics by providing a forum for the exchange of experience and discussions between clinicians, ethicists and ethics consultants. […]
How Abortion Law Works in Texas
Remember a little while ago there was a rash of proposals in the US that’d force women to see a sonogram of the foetus, or to listen to detailed descriptions of it, before having an abortion? Yeah: them. Well, via Ophelia, here’s an account of what really happens. Halfway through my pregnancy, I learned that […]
A Conscience Clause with Claws
There’s a flurry of papers on conscientious objection in the latest JME: Giles Birchley argues, taking his cue from Arendt, that conscientious objection has a place in medicine here; Sophie Strickland’s paper on medical students’ attitude to conscientious objection (which I mentioned in July) is here; and Morten Magelssen wonders when conscientious objection should be accepted here. […]
What can we Learn from “The Exorcist”?
When John Sentamu stood up in the House of Lords a couple of weeks ago and spoke about the need for the NHS to concern itself with “spiritual” needs – and illustrated his claim with an anecdote about something resembling an exorcism – the response from a lot of the blogosphere was, at its friendliest, one […]
Exporting and Using Medical Equipment
A student writes: I am a 5th Year Medical Student involved in a charity organisation that collects medical goods that are recycled/past expiry dates but still in good condition for re-use/excess from stocks, and aims to provide more impoverished clinics and hospitals abroad with these goods through students’ electives. I have been trying to find […]
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 […]
Special Offer! Genital Mutilation!
Today’s dose of righteous anger comes, via Ophelia Benson and Marie Myung-Ok Lee writing in The Atlantic, from the fifth annual Congress on Aesthetic Vaginal Surgery, held just outside Tuscon at the end of last year. The affable organizer of the Tucson event, Dr. Red Alinsod, was an early entrant into cosmetic-gyn, and is recognized for […]
Language and ethics – being “let” to go overdue
By David Hunter The more I think about it the more I think that one issue bioethicists should play much closer attention to is the language used to describe things. This isn’t a new thought, Kongzi (known as Confucius in the West) said: Tsze-lu said, “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in […]