By Elspeth Davies In the past, people only became patients when they felt unwell and visited their doctor in search of remedies. In recent decades, a shift towards prevention in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has meant that people can become patients on the basis of their future risk of disease, rather than only […]
Category: screening
Public reactions to non-invasive prenatal testing funding in England, France and Germany: The case of Heidi Crowter and Maire Lea-Wilson in England.
By Adeline Perrot and Ruth Horn The introduction of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) into public health systems in recent years has been the subject of controversy in England, France and Germany. In England, for example, the ‘Don’t Screen Us Out’ campaign recently supported the case of Crowter and Lea-Wilson, challenging the UK Secretary of State […]
Do No Harm in cancer screening programmes: can consent save the day?
By Lotte Elton Screening might harm you. That isn’t what the adverts will tell you. But, increasingly, there is a growing awareness that, for some, cancer screening might lead to unnecessary and potentially harmful investigations and treatments. This seems to violate the ethical principle of non-maleficence: the injunction that doctors ‘do no harm’ to their […]