An area of research with which I’ve been toying for quite a long time now is to try to provide an answer to the question “What are doctors for?”. (Admittedly, the possibility of a cheap’n’nasty Heidegger pun in the title, Wozu Doktor?, has a reasonably high place in the list of the project’s attractions… Ho-hum. It’s […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
Death and palliation – thoughts on Purdy.
A letter in The Times today considers the duty of doctors to ease the dying process, in the light of the Debbie Purdy case. Dr MS Ali wonders why “people like Debbie Purdy and others have to fear that they will not get the necessary assistance from the medical profession to relieve their suffering […]
On Hospital Ethicists
At the beginning of August, Dan Sokol wrote a piece for the BBC news site in which he touched on the place of hospital-employed ethicists. Apparently, this is a reasonably common position in the States. I used to be of the opinion that hospital ethicists would be a good idea – when I was a student, […]