By Daniel M. Hausman. According to surveys most of the population in many countries maintain that health policy should favour treating those who are more severely ill, even if the benefit to them is somewhat less than the benefit the same resources could have provided to those who are less severely ill. Most bioethicists who […]
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Mandatory Reporting in Sports Medicine
By Amanda Szabo & Zachary Winkelmann. Athletic trainers (ATs) are sports medicine healthcare professional who are in continuous contact with patients, typically adolescents. While ATs are typically familiar with the legal obligations in the United States to provide the proper standard of care to their patients and are familiar with state practice acts regarding services […]
Charging migrant women for pregnancy care is a worrying sign of the times
By Arianne Shahvisi and Fionnuala Finnerty Precious is a 26-year-old Eritrean woman who has recently arrived in the UK. She wishes to apply for asylum but is yet to do so. Precious is destitute and is living in a church and relying on the kindness of the Eritrean community. She sees a GP at an […]
Advance directives, personal identity, and the body: what follows if dementia produces a different individual?
By Govind Persad. I recently published “Authority Without Identity: Defending Advance Directives via Posthumous Rights Over One’s Body” in JME. In the paper, I argue that even if the psychological changes caused by dementia mean that the individual who existed before dementia is a different individual from the individual who exists afterward, a pre-dementia advance […]
Should you appeal against your Mental Health Act Section?
By Paul Gosney, Paul Lomax, Carwyn Hooper, Aileen O’Brien We felt that there was an acceptance in mental healthcare that appeal tribunals are an inherently good thing, that they are an appropriate counterweight to the power the state gives health professionals to detain and treat people against their will. This praise of tribunals is found […]
From Cochrane to Aquinas: Euthanasia, palliative opioid use and palliative sedation
By Thomas David Riisfeldt Having previously studied bioethics at university, I welcomed the recent opportunity to leave my comfortable philosopher’s armchair (albeit with some hesitation) and work as a junior doctor in a palliative care hospital. My daily routine began with a ward round to check in on my patients. In addition to exploring complex […]
Making money in medical ethics
By Daniel Sokol Ten years ago, I was asked to contribute a chapter to a medical careers guide called ‘So you want to be a brain surgeon?’. The editors wanted me to write about life as a medical ethicist, including the salary. On a 5-point scale from a single £ to £££££, I gave it […]
Obesity, equity and choice
By T.M. Wilkinson An awful lot of people are getting fatter than is good for their health. Many jurisdictions, under pressure from public health advocates, are trying to steer choices away from the obesogenic by taxing and regulating sugary and fatty food and drink. No one I know of thinks these methods will solve the […]
What Makes an Emergency?
By Iain Brassington Stanley Cavell died a few days ago. He is, I suspect, not widely known among medical ethicists, and is cited less. Fair enough: medical ethics wasn’t his thing. It’s a shame, though, because his work did strike me as being worth getting to know. This is not to say that I was familiar […]
Guest Post: pathology incidental findings in the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project
Authors: Nicole C. Lockhart, Carol J. Weil, Latarsha J. Carithers, Susan E. Koester, A. Roger Little, Simona Volpi, Helen M. Moore, Benjamin E. Berkman Paper: Development of a consensus approach for return of pathology incidental findings in the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project In 2010, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a research program […]