There’s a remarkable piece on the Hastings Center’s blog by Alycia Hogenmiller about a drug called Addyi. Addyi is a drug that doesn’t work to treat a condition that doesn’t exist, pushed by campaigners who are actually industry shills. Sprout Pharmaceuticals, run by Cindy and Robert Whitehead, was determined to obtain regulatory approval for flibanserin […]
Category: Regulation and Regulators
Individually-Randomized Controlled Trials of Vaccines Against the Next Outbreak
Guest Post: Nir Eyal, Marc Lipsitch Paper: Vaccine testing for emerging infections: the case for individual randomisation The humbling experience of international response to Ebola taught the world a thing or two on preparing for Zika and for other emerging infections. Some of those lessons pertain to vaccine development against emerging infections. One lesson was […]
The Deadly Business of an Unregulated Global Stem Cell Market
Guest Post: The deadly business of an unregulated global stem cell industry Tereza Hendl and Tamra Lysaght In our paper, we report on the case of a 75-year old Australian woman who died in December 2013 from complications of an autologous stem cell procedure. This case was tragic and worth reporting to the medical ethics community […]
Combating Doping in Sports: More of the Same or What?
Guest Post: Bengt Kayser and Jan Tolleneer Paper: Ethics of a relaxed antidoping rule accompanied by harm-reduction measures Doping in sports continues to be prominently present in the media. Regularly ’scandals’ surface that then trigger flurries of articles, documentaries and reactions in the media. The general tone is one of moral opprobrium, dopers are considered deviant […]
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 […]
Chappell on Midwives and Regulation
Richard Yetter Chappell has drawn my attention to this – a blog post in which he bemoans the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s rules about indemnity insurance, and the effects that they’ll have on independent midwives. (I’d never heard of independent midwives – but an IM – according to Independent Midwives UK – is “a fully […]
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 […]
Trump’s Anti-Regulator
In the latest edition of “Dude, really?” news to come from the post-election US… Wait: let me start that again. In the latest edition-that-I’ve-had-time-to-digest-because-I-really-can’t-keep-up-with-this-stuff edition of “Dude, really?” news to come from the post-election US, it would appear that a strong candidate to head the Food and Drug Administration under Donald Trump is one Jim […]