By Toni Saad and Ronak Ved Medical treatments nearly always involve a trade-off of burdens and benefits. Those of us who treat patients are acutely aware of this, although we sometimes struggle to define and balance benefits and burdens. A particularly difficult situation arises when a treatment can prolong life at the cost of significant […]
Latest articles
Lived experience in public health: taking it seriously without turning it into proof
By Jordan Sibeoni, Laurence Verneuil and Anne Revah-Lévy “It happened to me, so it’s true.” Few sentences carry more weight in today’s health debates, and few are harder to answer without sounding cruel. Why did we come this question? For over a decade, as clinicians and qualitative health researchers, our work has been about […]
First comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage? The limits of marriage-centred pronatalism
By Ji Young Lee Births outside of marriage are common in Northern Europe and Latin America. In Denmark, where I am currently based, more than 50% of children are born outside of marriage. But in South Korea, where I am originally from, nonmarital births have historically hovered below 5%. This stark contrast between the countries […]
When the definition of moral distress becomes a research problem
By Cédric Margot In early July 2025, I received an email from a group of researchers in animal research and occupational health whom I had never met. They were looking for a linguist who might help them conduct a semantic analysis of definitions of moral distress. Their reason was strikingly concrete: “We need this definition to […]
Nobody can check whether you really wrote it
By Boon-How Chew Often I have sat on a committee deciding whether someone deserved to be listed as an author or co-investigator. We had the manuscript or research protocol, the byline and a tidy contributorship statement. What we did not have was any way of knowing whether that statement was true. We approved it anyway. […]
The Atlanta child murders study: What did families consent to?
By Kyoko L. Yoda “It’s 10pm, do you know where your children are?” The Atlanta Child Murders (1979-1981) are not simply history to me. I was a child in suburban Atlanta then, and I remember the fear surrounding the disappearances and murders. I remember Atlanta news reporter, Monica Kaufman, saying the above haunting phrase every […]
Should we create “digital duplicates” of real people?
By Paul Jurcys, Clint Hurshman, Cristina Voinea, William D’Alessandro, Faisal Feroz, Soraj Hongladarom, Atay Kozlovski, Benjamin Lange, Pengbo Liu, Jerry Menikoff, Sven Nyholm, Anna Puzio, Paula Sweeney, Bhavya G. Sharma, Eric Schwitzgebel, Constantin Vica, Daniel Weissglass, Julian Savulescu, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Sebastian Porsdam Mann and Brian D. Earp Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, we […]
One Health and the Marburg outbreak in Rwanda
By Zohar Lederman As the global community frantically monitors the Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we are reminded yet again of our shared vulnerabilities, both as individuals and as a globalized community. Often in the face of microbes, individuals’ immunity is only one among several factors that determine the […]
The most effective intervention that nobody recommends
By Nicolas Marty and Kevin Vezirian In 2023, Science reported that as many as nine in ten laboratory animal personnel will experience compassion fatigue at some point in their careers. For a workplace problem of that magnitude, occupational health offers a standard instrument: the hierarchy of controls, which ranks responses to a hazard from most […]
The neglected ethical issues in clinical practice
By Daniel Sokol When I was a student, some time around the Jurassic period, a professor at All Souls College, Oxford told me that the key to publishing successful articles was finding a good idea. A good idea or topic, he said, could offset even mediocre writing skills. At first, finding these ideas was a […]