Guest Post by James Wilson The controversy over the Giubilini and Minerva article has highlighted an important disconnect between the way that academic bioethicists think about their role, and what ordinary people think should be the role of bioethics. The style of this dispute – its acrimony and apparent incomprehension on both sides – are […]
Category: The Art of Medicine
Of Tusks and Tuskegee: A Problem in Research Ethics
Xtaldave, by his own admission, has the horn. Well, if you’re being accurate about it, he has the tusk. But what’s important is that he has a whopping great piece of ivory to play with. Dave works in the labs here in Manchester, doing clever things with chemicals and science and crystalography and that sort […]
Exporting and Using Medical Equipment
A student writes: I am a 5th Year Medical Student involved in a charity organisation that collects medical goods that are recycled/past expiry dates but still in good condition for re-use/excess from stocks, and aims to provide more impoverished clinics and hospitals abroad with these goods through students’ electives. I have been trying to find […]
Spineless in Saudi?
A little while ago, Richard Ashcroft alerted me to this story: a judge in Saudi Arabia was considering surgical paralysis as the sentence for a man who had caused a similar injury to someone else in a fight. The BBC’s story came via a report on Amnesty’s website, which you can find here. The story […]
Who Ya Gonna Call?
Here’s a short story about the evolution of modern science: we used to understand very little about the world, and lacked the means to understand it. But we wanted to know how it worked, and we invented things like gods and demons to explain phenomena. As we gradually learned more and more about the way […]
Sporting Chances and the Justification of Surgery
There’s an interesting story on the front page of the Manchester Evening News about an 11-year-old who has asked that her right leg be removed so that she has a better chance of becoming a paralympian. […]
Acronym Overload: HoC S&TC report on homeopathy published…
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s report on homeopathy was published today (and is available here). The findings have not been diluted; the Committee didn’t sugar the sugar pill. […]
A Very Small Post about Homeopathy
I know I keep stressing the distinction between ethics and activist – and how it’s usually just before I witter on about something vaguely activistic. However, I do think it’s worth popping over to look at the 10:23 Campaign, which takes a robust and sceptical attitude to homeopathy. If you’re not sure about why it’s […]
Teaching Ethics in Medical Schools
My attention has wandered recently to this editorial in Clinical Medicine, concerning the place and content of ethics education in the undergraduate medical curriculum. There’s nothing Earth-shattering in there, but the piece does draw out a few persistent problems with teaching ethics within the medical degree: […]
Nursing by Degree
A couple of weeks ago, the government announced that, from 2013, all nursing staff would have to be graduates. “Degree-level education,” said Health Minister for England Ann Keen, will provide new nurses with the decision-making skills they need to make high-level judgements in the transformed NHS. I’m not so sure of this. […]