Guest Post: Mara Buchbinder Paper: Aid-in-dying laws and the physician’s duty to inform Why do so many people assume that any clinical communication about aid-in-dying (AID, also known as assisted suicide), where it is legal, ought to be patient-initiated? Physician participants in my ongoing study tend to assume that physicians should wait for patients to initiate […]
Category: Professionalism
Professional Codes and Diagnosis at a Distance
This is the second part of my response to Trish Greenhalgh’s post on the propriety of medics, psychiatrists in particular, offering diagnoses of Donald Trump’s mental health. In the last post, I concentrated on some of the problems associated with making such a diagnosis (or, on reflection, what might be better called a “quasi-diagnosis”). In […]
Diagnosing Trump
It doesn’t take too much time on the internet to find people talking with some measure of incredulity about Donald Trump. Some of this talk takes the tone of horrified fascination; some of it is mocking (and is accompanied by correspondingly mocking images); and some people are wondering aloud about his mental health. In this […]
Professionalism, or Prying?
“Professionalism” is a funny thing. About this time last year, I was struggling to get a new course written for the coming semester; it was on professional ethics for lawyers. A colleague made a comment along the lines that I must be spending a lot of time looking at the professional codes; I replied that […]
Should Junior Doctors Still Strike?
Guest Post by Adam James Roberts In early July, the British Medical Association’s junior members voted by a 16-point margin to reject a new employment contract negotiated between the BMA’s leadership and the Government. The chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, Johann Malawana, stood down following the result, noting the “considerable anger and mistrust” […]
Free Labour and Quiet Doubts
Those of us on the academic side of things will almost certainly recognise the situation: you’re sitting in your school’s Teaching & Learning committee, or a staff/student committee meeting, or something like that, and you hear the complaint from students that they should get more contact time. Academics should spend more time teaching rather than […]
There’s Argument, and there’s Disputation.
Very well, then: let’s allow that the quality of argument in bioethics – and clinical ethics in particular – is not of high quality. What should be done about it? That’s a hard question, though it’s predictable and wholly justifiable that it should be asked. And, to be honest, I don’t know offhand. I might […]
Healthcare Ethics Consultants’ Place in the World of Health Care ‘Professionals’
Guest Post by Abraham Schwab During a recent meeting at a local hospital, I was asked what role a good Healthcare Ethics Consultant should play. I gave a more ambiguous answer than I would like. I pointed out that Healthcare Ethics Consultants can help patients, providers, and administrators come to a common understanding of the values […]
Special Obligations: What Can Physicians Learn from Parenting?
Guest post by Jon Tilburt and Baruch Brody Editor’s note: this post introduces a recent paper by the authors now in press at the Journal of Medical Ethics: “Doubly distributing special obligations: what professional practice can learn from parenting“ Gaps between our ideals and our behavior are common. Sometimes what we say we believe and what we actually practice […]
Patient Views about Consent, Confidentiality & Information-Sharing in Genetic Medicine.
Guest post by Sandi Dheensa, Angela Fenwick and Anneke Lucassen Imagine you’re a clinician in genetic medicine. For a while, you’ve been seeing Joe Bloggs, a patient with a mutation in a gene that’s caused a hereditary form of colon cancer. As is your standard practice, you help Joe identify who in his family is also […]