By Kate Lyle, Susie Weller, Gabby Samuel, Anneke Lucassen Neoliberalism promotes the rights and responsibilities of individuals to make their own choices and manage their own risks, and as a political approach dominates Western societies. As such, neoliberalism has driven a preoccupation with quantifying and managing risks within society; the idea being that clarifying the […]
Category: Medical ethics
Modern bioethical principles – a colonialist holdover or universally applicable?
By Max Ying Hao Lim Are contemporary bioethical practices unequivocally, unconditionally and absolutely universal? Or is the very notion of universality a holdover from a Western-centric colonial ideology seeking to impose ‘best practices’ onto the Global South and other third-world countries? This ‘colonialist’ dilemma is as time-worn as it is fundamental to the modern conception […]
Should doctors be held to higher moral standards than others?
By Daniel Sokol In a highly publicised case, Dr Arora – a general practitioner – was suspended for a month after the Medical Practitioners Tribunal deemed her dishonest for telling a medical colleague that she had been promised a laptop when no such promise had been made. The Tribunal noted that Dr Arora’s exaggeration brought […]
Seeing surgeons to safety
By Edwin Jesudason. Surgeons around the world are videoing their operations to present innovations to their peers at academic meetings. In my paper, I argue that they and their hospitals have an ethical duty to protect patients, which should require the routine videoing of surgery as long as the patient consents. This would provide something […]
Respect for autonomy in medical ethics: it’s more complicated than you think
By Xavier Symons and Susan Pennings. Respect for patient autonomy is perhaps the pre-eminent principle in contemporary bioethics. What else, after all, is more important than respecting the considered preferences of patients and research participants in medicine? Tom Beauchamp once wrote that “[the] moral value of respect for autonomy precedes and is not the product […]
Thinking critically about race and ethnicity in biomedical research
By Bradley Kawano. As a senior at Occidental College, I had the privilege to hear Rev. William Barber deliver a speech on race and the political divide in the U.S. Speaking about our politics, he asserted that we could not avoid the problem of race. Instead, we must confront it head-on. In science, we face […]
Three observations about justifying AI
By Anantharaman Muralidharan, G Owen Schaefer, Julian Savulescu. Consider the following kind of medical AI. It consists of 2 parts. The first part consists of a core deep machine learning algorithm. These blackbox algorithms may be more accurate than human judgment or interpretable algorithms, but are notoriously opaque in terms of telling us on what […]
Meeting the challenges of using automated second opinions
By Hendrik Kempt and Saskia K. Nagel. Diagnostics is a difficult inferential process requiring an immense amount of cognitive labor. Not only must physicians gather evidence and evaluate that evidence to fit the symptoms of a patient, they usually need to do that with imperfect knowledge in an ever changing field of research, and limited […]
Respecting autonomy in altered states: Navigating ethical quandaries in psychedelic therapy
By Hannah McLane, Courtney Hutchison, Daniel Wikler, Timothy Howell, & Emma Knighton. Research into psychedelic-assisted therapy has grown in the past ten years as non-profits, academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and even venture capitalists race to develop protocols for using MDMA, psilocybin, ketamine, and other psychedelic substances to treat mental illness. Already, dozens of ketamine clinics […]
Ethically inconsistent marketing of communication and resolution programs
By Doug Wojcieszak The movement to encourage physicians to disclose, apologize, and make amends (financial and otherwise) following medical errors is gaining momentum, especially in the United States. Many people are supporting this movement, including a large and growing collection of healthcare, insurance, and legal professionals and patient advocates who call themselves the “Collaborative for […]