By G. Owen Schaefer Honesty and integrity are pillars of medical professionalism which I and many others teach to healthcare students. Sometimes, though, they can be in tension with other considerations – as illustrated in a distressing case study reported in Slate magazine, concerning medical decision-making in the US when ICE comes knocking. The case, […]
Category: Medical ethics
A Confucian virtue ethics approach to medical internship in Hong Kong
By Trevor T. W. Wan and Wai Tak Victor Li In Hong Kong, an internship, also called housemanship, is a 12-month period during which fresh medical graduates rotate across four departments in public hospitals and acquire hands-on clinical experience through daily care of patients. Yet this phase is fraught with inherent tension: interns, with relatively […]
Considering the ethics of sedation, with an eye on euthanasia and treatment withdrawal
By Hitoshi Arima Today, many people spend their final days in a medically induced sleep. According to a survey conducted in Japan, just under 20 percent of people who die from cancer receive some form of sedation. Patients approaching death may experience extremely severe suffering. For example, a cancerous tumor may invade areas dense with […]
Testing AI in real-world medical ethics
By Daniel Sokol This post adds to the literature on AI in medical ethics by testing how freely available AI models perform when presented with realistic ethical scenarios relevant to clinical practice. In May 2025, I wrote a blog about ChatGPT’s performance in an ‘honesty test’ for clinicians. It scored an impressive 43/44, outperforming the […]
Shared misuse, shared consequences: The ethical dimensions of antimicrobial resistance
By Zeynep Sude Yeşildağ and Şəfiqə Süleymanova Antibiotics are among the most significant advances in modern medicine, transforming once-fatal infections into easily treatable conditions. Yet this success has a fragile side. When antibiotics are used casually, without proper indication or supervision, the very tools designed to save lives begin to lose their effectiveness. What was once […]
“One problem per appointment?” Why setting limits can both fairer and safer
By Dr. Richard Armitage As a GP, I rarely see a single-issue consultation. One person comes with a sore throat, a bad back, and queries about their medications. Another comes with a headache, low mood, and wanting the results of a recent blood test. This is the nature of routine primary care. But it creates […]
What Does It Mean to Provide Medicine in a World of Declining Trust?
By Crystal Lemus What does it really mean to “provide medicine”? For many, the image is clinical—white coats, prescription pads, MRI scans, and protocols. But at its philosophical core, medicine is a moral act: one human being entering into the vulnerability of another. The practice of medicine is rooted in a complex interplay between trust, […]
The Fence Around Us: How India’s Medical System Enables Cultural Misogyny
By Anonymous* A baby girl starved to death in a South Indian hospital. No one was held accountable. I first heard about her during a forensic medicine lecture on starvation. The regular faculty were away, so a professor from a different specialty stepped in. As she listed various types of starvation, she paused to reflect […]
Meet your new medical ethicist: ChatGPT
By Daniel Sokol In February 2023, I wrote on this forum about a new honesty test for doctors.[1] Developed with an experienced clinical psychologist, the test was a Situational Judgement Test of 22 real-life scenarios involving truth-telling problems. The ‘correct’ answers were determined by six professors of medical ethics who were also medical doctors. To […]
Efficiency and Education: Finding Harmony in AI-Driven Medical Notes
By Trisha Nagin Artificial Intelligence (AI) scribing technology has been praised as a revolutionary tool in modern healthcare. It can be seen as an answer to the long-standing problem of physician burnout caused by documentation. By listening in on doctor-patient conversations and generating clinical notes automatically, the technology is designed to save time, increase efficiency, […]