By Rebecca Limb and Liz James On 1st December 2020, the Tavistock judgment was published. The legal issue concerning the court was identifying the circumstances where a child, under the age of 18 diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria (GD), is competent to give valid consent to the administration of puberty blockers (PB). The judgment has made […]
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Prize, Not a Price: How the right reward could solve the problem of kidney failure
By Aksel Braanen Sterri. Worldwide 1.2 million people are dying from kidney failure each year. The best treatment for kidney failure is a kidney transplant from a living donor, but too few people are willing to donate. In the paper, Prize, Not a Price: Reframing Rewards for Kidney Donors, I defend a way to meet […]
Corona solidarity: Beware! It may not be what you think
By Matti Häyry Already during the early weeks and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many media outlets started to talk about “corona solidarity”. We are facing a crisis, they said, but we are pulling through with miraculous mutual support and everybody chipping in for the common good. I found this narrative suspect from the outset, […]
Medical ethics in the anthropocene – the health sector must divest from industries impacting planetary health
By Christian M. Schulz. The fifth mass extinction began 66 million years ago after an asteroid, measuring 10 kilometers in diameter, hit the peninsula of Yucatán. At the end of this huge loss of biodiversity, caused probably by ocean acidification, the most prominent victims were the dinosaurs. Currently, biodiversity is declining faster than at any […]
Solidarity and similarity: what kind of “we” are we, and why does it matter?
By Avery Kolers. Think of a time when you were trying to flex a rarely used muscle: say, learning to raise one eyebrow. In the moment, the action isn’t hard to do in the sense of being costly or requiring strength you don’t have, it’s hard to do because you don’t know how to isolate […]
AI in healthcare – why start a conversation with the general public?
By Elizabeth Ford Imagine the future. Imagine you are 76 years old. You visit your doctor to have her examine your knee, which hurts since you fell over yesterday, tripping on your front step. After tapping some information into her computer, your doctor turns to you and says, “Would you like to discuss any concerns […]
Evidence-based injustices
By Jonathan Michaels. In healthcare, and many other areas of endeavour, policy and guidance claim legitimacy on the basis that they are evidence-based and follow the best scientific advice. Expert advisory committees collect, consider and interpret extensive, and often complex, scientific evidence. As we have seen in the diverse responses to Covid-19, evidence and expertise […]
Clamping down on unethical research: time for a moratorium on publishing Chinese transplant research
By Wendy A Rogers, Angela Ballantyne, Wendy C Higgins, Wendy Lipworth. Our paper in JME investigates the pros and cons of publishing and/or retracting unethical biomedical research. We focus on Chinese transplant research using organs procured from non-consenting executed prisoners. However, this is not the only topic currently raising questions about the justifiability of publishing […]
Immunity passports – reopening the economy and repackaging racism
By Natalie Kofler and Françoise Baylis In the midst of worldwide protests against anti-Black racism and violent policing, private companies and governments are developing a novel platform for discrimination that would effectively increase the reach of law enforcement into public society – so called, digital “immunity passports”. It all starts with a seemingly innocuous plan […]
Evidence-based injustices
By Jonathan Michaels. In healthcare, and many other areas of endeavour, policy and guidance claims legitimacy on the basis that it is evidence-based and follows the best scientific advice. Expert advisory committees collect, consider and interpret extensive, and often complex, scientific evidence. As we have seen in the diverse responses to Covid-19, evidence and expertise […]