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 – […]
Latest articles
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 […]
Moving beyond the “Balance Sheet”: How narrative ethics can inform judicial deliberations on treatment refusal
By Prof. Adv. Maya Peled Raz Too often, when courts face the question of forced medical treatment for individuals under guardianship, the conversation quickly narrows to clinical calculations of risk and benefit. As a legal expert and clinical ethics consultant working within the healthcare system, I have often felt that something vital is lost in […]
For whom the cry for help tolls?
By Nicola Cocco, Valentina Marchese and Federico Nicoli “Who is here on the shore? Who is watching this shipwreck from the mainland? Is it really just me, no one else?” Vincent Delecroix, Small Boat, 2023 On February 2, 2026, the NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans reported that up to 1,000 people could be missing […]
Metaphysics and reproductive ethics
By Arjun Devanesan Recently, a group of philosophers have engaged in a lively dispute about the metaphysics of pregnancy. Specifically, Elselijn Kingma argued that, contrary to popular opinion, a foetus is not merely contained by a gestator like a bun in an oven, but a part of its body. Other authors (including myself) have argued […]