CIA exploited incarcerated Black Americans in race for “mind-control” agent

By Dana Strauss and Monnica Williams. A well-kept American secret is that the CIA-funded research that exploited incarcerated Black Americans along with other vulnerable groups in America’s hunt for a “mind-control” drug. Arising from fears that LSD could be used as a form of biochemical warfare during the cold war and that the Soviets had […]

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Conscientious Non-Referral

By Samuel Reis-Dennis and Abram Brummett. The year is 1950. A married couple living in the United States bring their 12-year-old daughter to a paediatric surgeon with a concern: their daughter has been masturbating. Despite the paediatrician’s explanation that such behaviour is not abnormal or unhealthy, the parents request that the surgeon perform a clitoridectomy. […]

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Food poverty and health justice

By Jess Knight. “Have you ever smoked? And what about alcohol? Anybody else at home with you? What do you do for work?”  A ‘social history’ is an essential component of any medical interview, helping clinicians to understand their patients’ situation, background and the presence of any well-established social risks to health and wellbeing. Used […]

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Split liver transplantation: Is saving more lives always the ethical option?

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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