By Tae Wan Kim, John Roberts, Alan Strudler, and Sridhar Tayur. In 2016, the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN) and United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) posed an increasingly consequential question: Should a large liver always be split if medically safe? During a split liver transplantation (SLT), a whole human liver is divided into […]
Category: Medical ethics
FDA approves aducanumab – do not get carried away!
By Erik Gustavsson, Pauline Raaschou, Gerd Lärfars, Lars Sandman, Niklas Juth. In spring 2019 Gerd Lärfars (head of the pharmaceutical division at the Stockholm Region in Sweden) suggested that we put together an interdisciplinary group consisting of clinicians, medical ethicists, and scholars with experience in health care administration. The aim for this group would be […]
Coerced sterilization of women in immigration detention: how did we get here?
By Mariam O. Fofana, On September 14 2020, the news broke that Dawn Wooten, a former nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC), a privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, had blown the whistle regarding coerced sterilization of women at the facility. Wooten reported an alarmingly high rate of hysterectomies sometimes performed […]
A kind of care: sexual intimacy for older adults in long term care
By Vanessa Schouten. How sexual intimacy is conceptualized matters, and this is particularly true for people whose decisions are shaped by the fact that they live in a communal facility under the care of others, such as older adult residents of long-term care facilities. As one of the participants in our study pointed out, intimate […]
Urgency, Delayed Decision-making and Ethics in the Court of Protection
By Dominic Wilkinson. [Cross post from the Practical Ethics blog] On 11th June 2021, I was a public observer (via MS Teams) of a case in the Court of Protection: Case No. 1375980T Re GU (also blogged about by Jenny Kitzinger here). The case was (though I did not know it beforehand) related closely to issues that I […]
Medical complicity in torture
By Derek Summerfield. During the Middle Ages in Europe the practice of torture drew distinction from its association with confessed truth, repentance, and salvation, yet by 1874 Victor Hugo could write that “torture has ceased to exist.” However there has never been any doubt that torture would outlive its obituarists. As I record in my […]
Do doctors engaging in advocacy speak for themselves or their profession?
By Elizabeth Lanphier In the United States, where I live and work, it is common for physicians to speak out on a variety of topics both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, physicians advocate against gun violence as a matter of public health. Pediatricians become #tweetiatrician on social media to raise awareness about […]
Civil commitment for opioid misuse: The need for an ethical use framework
By John C Messinger, Daniel J Ikeda, Ameet Sarpatwari In the 12 months prior to September 2020, there were over 66,000 fatal opioid overdoses in the United States, a 36% increase over the previous year. Many scholars have hypothesized that this dramatic rise was driven at least in part by conditions brought on by the […]
Knowledge, power, and patients: The ethics of open notes
By Charlotte Blease, Catherine DesRoches, Maria Hägglund, Adam Hayden, Hanife Rexhepi, & Liz Salmi Most of us now use the internet to check the health of our bank balance. Worldwide, however, the majority of patients still cannot inspect their actual healthcare records online. From April 5 in the USA the law changed. With few exceptions […]
How the laboratory and the pathologist affect access to care
By Cullen M. Lilley and Kamran M. Mirza. As you sit in your hospital room after surgery, a feeling of uncertainty may start to grow. Each tube blood draw is like a tally mark for another day gone by without an answer. Meanwhile, each tube of blood, biopsy material, or the resection from your surgery […]