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 […]
Category: consent
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, […]
Re-thinking consent for treatment: clinical interests and the public interest
By Abeezar I. Sarela. In its recent guidance on consent, the General Medical Council (GMC) advises doctors to not provide treatment that ‘you (the doctor) don’t think would be in their (the patient’s) clinical interests’. It follows that doctors should only provide treatments that are in the patient’s clinical interests. But, what exactly is meant […]
The furore around whole bodily gestational donation: a tale of misplaced anger?
By Anna Nelson. Prompted by a sensationalist headline in the Daily Mail, there has been a furore on social media around an article published last year by bioethicist Anna Smajdor in which she defends ‘Whole Bodily Gestational Donation’ (WBGD). Put simply WBGD means that, with prior consent, the bodies of women in a permanent vegetative […]
How much information is enough? It should be your choice!
By Sophie Ludewigs, Jonas Narchi, Lukas Kiefer and Eva C. Winkler. It is rare to return from a visit at the doctor’s office or a clinic and feel informed to a satisfactory degree. In many cases, one will either feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of medical information and the professional lingo used, or, on […]
David Bennett and the first porcine xenotransplantation
By Christopher Gyngell and Julian Savulescu. At 57, David Bennett was dying. He had a decades long history of heart disease. Prior treatments, including surgery, had proved ineffective. In November 2021, he was diagnosed with uncontrollable arrhythmia and was admitted to the University of Maryland Medical Centre. Despite the best efforts of clinicians, his condition […]