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 […]
Category: Medical ethics
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 […]
How to reduce the carbon footprint of anaesthesia
By Joshua Parker, Nathan Hodson, Paul Young & Cliff Shelton. If asked what an anaesthetist does, most would picture a doctor placing a mask on a patient’s face and asking them to count backwards from ten to one. As they count, they inhale a colourless gas and before passing the halfway mark their countdown stops […]
Outgrowing the infancy? The concept of “Meaningful Human Control” in health
By Eva Maria Hille, Patrik Hummel and Matthias Braun. It takes its first steps over time, some of which are successful, some which aren’t. Its steps are becoming more regular and steady until the tempo picks up and it strives to run. As time goes by, it’s outgrowing its infancy. Similar to the steps of […]
“Good Medical Practice” and the Climate Crisis
By Rammina Yassaie. Primum non nocere. First do no harm. Words that are ingrained into every doctor from the moment they graduate medical school, as the resounding ethical principle to live and practice by. Medicine is often thought of as a career that involves ‘saving lives’, but how commonly are doctors encouraged to consider the […]