By Helen Lynne Turnham, Sarah-Jane Bowen, Sitara Ramdas, Andrew Smith, Dominic Wilkinson, Emily Harrop. Children with medical complexity and technology dependence are at constant risk of sudden death or catastrophic complication. In some cases, their diagnoses may mean that their lives are likely to be short regardless of treatments offered, and remaining in hospital, particularly […]
Category: Medical ethics
Advance directives in dementia care: Moving from the philosophical debate to practical guidelines
By Wayne Shelton and Cynthia Geppert. The case of Margo, introduced by Ronald Dworkin in 1993, described an individual with advanced dementia who would spend hours happily gazing at the same magazines, interacting in discrete experiential moments with those around her, and eating heartily. By all accounts, Margo was a happy individual. However, years earlier […]
Terms of cervix: IUD trials as a condition of elective sterilisation
By Teresa Baron. Getting your tubes tied is no easy feat. Plenty has been said in recent years about barriers to elective sterilisation, and persuading a doctor to do the deed is a particularly difficult for young, child-free women. If a woman has a long-term partner, her practitioner will often encourage her to see if […]
The delicate balance between aggressive treatments and palliative care
By Ilaria Bertini. In recent months the story of Indi Gregory has been brought to light by the media as another dreadful story of life and death involving a critically ill 8-month-old baby with no prospect of recovery. When Indi was born, she was admitted as a PICU patient at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham […]
Reflections on a staff-student partnership: teachable moments in ethics
By Jennifer O’Neill. Context In early February 2022, my colleague and I embarked upon a programme of research examining our shared interest in patient healthcare involvement. As lecturers at the University of Glasgow School of Medicine, we identified a unique opportunity to establish a staff-student research partnership. The underlying rationale was that our student partners […]
To care or not to care
By Victoria Min-Yi Wang and Brian Baigrie. The idea for our paper, Caring as the Unacknowledged Matrix of Evidence-Based Nursing, germinated in a philosophy of medicine graduate class that Brian was teaching and Victoria was attending. As a group, we discussed what counts as evidence in medicine, how values do and should enter into clinical […]
Survival, dying well and intensive care
By Thomas Donaldson. Intensive care (ICU) medicine is amazing. When a disease causes a patient to become critically ill because their lungs, kidneys or cardiovascular system have started to fail, ICU treatments can take over the job of these organ systems to provide extra time for them to recover. Intensive care treatment has prevented the […]
From bytes to bedside: Exploring AI in medical ethics
By Michael Balas. In the swiftly advancing realm of artificial intelligence (AI), a tantalizing question emerges: can AI systems help us navigate the murky waters of medical ethics? Our recent study, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME), tackled this very question, and our findings were enlightening. At the heart of our research was […]
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 […]