By Hojjat Soofi. There are increasing calls to offer more dignity-promoting care to people with dementia, particularly in long-term care settings. In Australia, the recent Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety recommends revising the foundational principles that underpin current care practices in residential aged care facilities (RACFs), which are home to many people […]
Category: Medical ethics
Recognising the rights of doctors within GMC guidelines
By Zeshan Qureshi and Mehrunisha Suleman. (As a medical professional, I will: Make the care of patients my first concern.) Doctors are trusted to make life-saving healthcare decisions. As a result, a duty of care towards patients must be a priority; no doctor should ever make a professional decision without appropriate consideration of the impact […]
Is neoliberalism bad for our health?
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 […]
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 […]