Guest Post by Wendy Rogers Earlier this year, a Malaysian politician, Datuk Bung Moktar Radin, travelled to China to receive a kidney transplant. The details are scanty. There is no mention of the source of the kidney that the Malaysian MP received. Reports of foreigners travelling to China for transplants rarely make the media, yet […]
Category: Politics
Recent Attempts to Restrict the Abortion Law in Poland: A Commentary
Guest post by Dr Atina Krajewska, University of Sheffield A couple of weeks ago news hit the headlines about attempts to introduce a total ban on abortion in Poland. The legislative proposal that caused outrange among women’s rights organisations has been drafted by a citizen’s initiative, “Stop Abortion”, and is the fourth attempt to restrict abortion […]
No to Conscientious Objection Accommodation in Health Care
Guest post by Udo Schuklenk Canada is currently in the midst of a national debate about the scope of assisted dying regulations and policies. It’s a result of a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that declared parts of the country’s Criminal Code null and void that criminalises assisted dying. As you would expect, there is a […]
Why Brits? Why India?
Julie Bindel had a piece in The Guardian the other day about India’s surrogate mothers. It makes for pretty grim reading. Even if the surrogates are paid, and are paid more than they might otherwise have earned, there’s still a range of problems that the piece makes clear. For one thing, the background of the surrogates is […]
Nurses Cannot be Good Catholics
Guest Post by John Olusegun Adenitire It seems that if you are a nurse you cannot be a good Catholic. Or, better: if you want to work as a nurse then you might have to give up some of your religious beliefs. A relatively recent decision of the UK Supreme Court, the highest court in the […]
Autism, Mental Illness, Euthanasia and the WaPo
There was a piece in the Washington Post the other day with a striking headline: Where the Prescription for Autism can be Death. Normally, if we’re saying that the prescription for x is y, we mean to say that y is being suggested as a treatment for x. Painkillers are the prescription for a bad back, a steroid cream the prescription […]
The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit
By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) * Note: this article was first published online at Quillette magazine. The official version is forthcoming in the HealthWatch Newsletter; see http://www.healthwatch-uk.org/. Introduction Science and medicine have done a lot for the world. Diseases have been eradicated, rockets have been sent to the moon, and convincing, causal explanations have been given for a whole range […]
Stay Classy, BMJ.
Lord only knows, it pains me to jump to George Osborne’s defence – more so by resurrecting a meme that was already past it when I was first invited to run this blog in 2008 – but on this one occasion, I’m going to have to do it. Last week, the BMJ reported about a case in […]
Zika, Gandhi and the CDC
Guest Post by Agomoni Ganguli Mitra Three pieces of news over the last weeks particularly troubled me. In the first, and perhaps most radical of them all, Latin American governments began to urge women not to become pregnant over the next couple of years, as a public health measure to restrict the number of children […]
Should Junior Doctors Strike?
Guest Post by Mark Toynbee, Adam Al-Diwani, Joe Clacey and Matthew Broome [Editor’s note: Events in the real world have moved more quickly than David or I have; the facts of the junior doctors’ strike have moved on since the paper was published and this post submitted. Still, the matters of principle remain. – IB] A […]