By Ilaria Bertini. UK media outlets have reported the upcoming implementation of Martha’s Rule within NHS foundation trusts, starting from April 2024. This rule will enable swift second medical opinions for patients, healthcare practitioners, or families who express concerns regarding the patient’s response to care provided. This new pathway takes its name from a 13-year-old […]
Category: consent
Voicing the realities of patient consent to unplanned obstetric interventions
By Frances Hand*, Morganne Wilbourne*, Sophie McAllister, Louise Print-Lyons, and Meena Bhatia. Approximately 46% of primiparous women using NHS facilities undergo an obstetric intervention during their labour. For women with a planned intervention (usually a caesarean birth) conversations regarding consent are mostly straightforward and occur during the pregnancy. Where an intervention is unplanned, current practice […]
Mindless consent
By Edwin Jesudason. How could consent be mindless, if it’s about our choosing to give permission? We could suggest at least two ways, the first familiar, the second – and the topic of this blog – perhaps less so. The first is habitual: the mindless ‘consent’ many of us give, with a passing click or […]
Threats to autonomy in uterus provision
By J. Y. Lee. In my recent extended essay published in JME, I argued that transitioning transgender men and cisgender women who do not wish to gestate should not be excluded from opportunities to autonomously provide their uterus in service of uterus transplantations (UTx). My argument was motivated by the fact that it is the norm […]
If only we’d known
By Edwin Jesudason. Lee Fierro was an actress who played Mrs Kintner in the Steven Spielberg classic “Jaws”. After slapping Chief Brodie, a sheriff with responsibilities for public safety, she cries: “I just found out that a girl got killed here last week and you knew, you knew there was a shark out there. You […]
Should ChatGPT be used to take consent from patients prior to surgery?
By Jemima Allen, Dominic Wilkinson, Brian Earp and Julian Koplin. Next month, you are due to have surgery on your knee. You’ve been on the waiting list for a while now, but the date for surgery is finally coming up. Normally, you would expect to speak to a member of the surgical team on […]
Genetic research and the collective good: participants as leaders
By Ilaria Galasso and Susi Geiger. Medical ethics has long centered around the question of how to balance the public or common good with individual rights. Different approaches to ethics would prioritize different values in the context of medical research participation. Well-established moral principles provide solid arguments both for an obligation to participate in medical […]
Consensual lethal organ harvesting: dissecting ‘double effect donation’
By Anthony McCarthy and Helen Watt. Imagine I am an altruistic person in good health who is struck by how many people my organs (heart, lungs etc) could save if I became a live donor. Perhaps my life is not going well, and I want to make a greater contribution to society than I have […]
Decision-making in injustice: MAiD in Canada after Bill C-7
By Kayla Wiebe and Amy Mullin. In February, 2022, a Canadian citizen with a severe case of multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) requested and subsequently received medical assistance in dying (MAiD). The decision to request MAiD was made after a two-year fight to access housing that would have made living with their condition tolerable. This kind of […]
The dark side of psychedelics’ power
By Daniel Villiger. Last year, the German crime series Tatort, which belongs to the most watched television shows in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, aired an episode that takes place in the psychedelic underground. In his mansion, a spiritually-oriented psychiatrist hosts psychedelics sessions for his patients or, rather, his followers. Little surprisingly for a crime story, […]