Flogging and the Medic

You must, by now, have heard of the Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi.  Just in case you haven’t (really?), here’s a potted biography: having set up the secularist forum Free Saudi Liberals, he was arrested for insulting Islam and showing disobedience.  Among the formal charges he faced was one for apostasy, which carries the death penalty in Saudi. […]

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Who’s the SilLIer?

It’s funny how things come together sometimes.  A few months ago, I mentioned a slightly strange JAMA paper that suggested that non-compliance with treatment regimes should be treated as a treatable condition in its own right.  The subtext there was fairly clear: that there’s potential scope for what we might term “psychiatric mission-creep”, whereby behaviour gets […]

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