By Dr Johnny Sakr Genetic testing is often assessed by asking a familiar question: does it change clinical management? If the answer is yes, the value of the test is relatively easy to explain. It may guide treatment, avoid unnecessary investigations, or improve health outcomes. But many genomic tests produce information that families value even […]
Latest articles
What values should a suicide prevention scheme express?
By Tessa Jane Holzman On 24 June 2025, the Australian Productivity Commission released an interim report evaluating the National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement. This report paints a scathing picture of the state of the Agreement. While the PC’s recommendations are certainly important components of a robust national strategy for mental health and suicide […]
Still relying on Thomson and Rachels? Read this first
By Matti Häyry Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” (1971) and James Rachels’s “Active and Passive Euthanasia” (1975) are still the gold standard for philosophical argument in medical ethics, five decades after they were published. This is horrible. Academic folklore has it that they both advocate reasonably moderate, even permissive views on abortion and […]
Why do we accept harm in sport?
By Jennifer Hardes Dvorak I stepped into a Taekwondo dojang the year I moved to Canada to pursue my PhD studies. As an international student, I was new to the country without any family or friends, and what began as a means of staying active and finding my place in a community soon became a core part of my everyday life. The dojang became my home from home – […]
Psychiatry and the actualization of freedom
By Austin Lam Psychiatry occupies an uneasy position within ethical life. Contemporary psychiatry often attempts to present itself as procedurally or scientifically neutral. Yet psychiatry is inevitably concerned with how human beings live, suffer, recover, and participate in social life. Every psychiatric assessment contains implicit judgments about agency, responsibility, autonomy, vulnerability, and meaningful recovery. As […]
Why ask about public attitudes toward xenotransplantation now?
By Agata Pacho, Antonia J Cronin, Mustafa Al-Haboubi, Paul Boadu and Nicholas Mays The world’s first clinical trial assessing the safety and efficacy of xenotransplantation (XT), in which kidneys from genetically modified pigs are transplanted into human recipients, is currently underway. The possibility of using whole animal organs to address the persistent global shortage of […]
Altered states, unmet needs: ethical issues in market authorization for psychedelics
By Christoph Bublitz The return of psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD to medicine seems imminent. Once associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, these substances have been the subject of serious clinical research for over a decade. In April, the U.S. President signed an Executive Order in support of psychedelic medicine. Shortly thereafter, the […]
The illusion of the “benign” cosmetic thyroidectomy: An ethics and teamwork wake-up call
By Behaylu Tesfamaryam Hagos, M.D. Elective surgeries for cosmetic reasons demand the highest level of ethical scrutiny. When a patient undergoes an operation for a benign, asymptomatic condition, driven by societal pressure rather than medical necessity, our tolerance for preventable, life-altering complications should be exactly zero. As an internist, an incidental encounter during a patient’s […]
The ontological shift: Why AI in clinical practice is a question of being
Farid bin Masood Much has been written for and against AI’s application in healthcare including screening, prediction, and simulation. But there’s a component of clinical work that matters just as much, maybe more: the clinician’s work as a human, including communicating with the patient and making decisions when faced with uncertainty. Much is being written […]
First, do no harm – then what?
What Iranian physicians under the Mahsa Amini crackdown reveal about medicine, complicity, and conscience. By Amir Davoodi In September 2022, a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Tehran, three days after being arrested by Iran’s morality police for wearing her hijab improperly. What followed was one of the largest protest movements […]