By Crystal Lemus What does it really mean to “provide medicine”? For many, the image is clinical—white coats, prescription pads, MRI scans, and protocols. But at its philosophical core, medicine is a moral act: one human being entering into the vulnerability of another. The practice of medicine is rooted in a complex interplay between trust, […]
Latest articles
The Fence Around Us: How India’s Medical System Enables Cultural Misogyny
By Anonymous* A baby girl starved to death in a South Indian hospital. No one was held accountable. I first heard about her during a forensic medicine lecture on starvation. The regular faculty were away, so a professor from a different specialty stepped in. As she listed various types of starvation, she paused to reflect […]
Why mandatory chemical castration could be ethically acceptable
By Lisa Forsberg and Thomas Douglas. The UK’s Secretary of State for Justice, Shabana Mahmood, is considering a ‘national rollout of voluntary chemical castration for sex offenders’. Chemical castration uses medications that lower testosterone activity with the intention of reducing libido. Extending use of chemical castration in sex offenders is one of the recommendations of […]
Do Brain Death guidelines conflict with reproductive autonomy?
By L. Syd M Johnson When Brain Death/Death by Neurologic Criteria (BD/DNC) occurs during pregnancy, complex questions emerge concerning the moral and legal status of the brain dead pregnant person, the continuation of life-sustaining treatment to save a fetus, the exploitation of pregnant bodies, and the potential conflicts between the prior, autonomous wishes of pregnant […]
Hi, I’m a hospice doctor. Here’s your bill.
By Jennifer Eitingon, MD, with Margaret P Battin, PhD When asked about the often serious ethical quandaries hospice providers are often faced when providing care for a patient nearing death, the one thing that plagues most is not the medical aspect of how to manage suffering, nor the existential questions of how we, as embodied […]
Adriana Smith is Far From the First Incubator
By Joel Cox & Allison Bajada “We’re just human incubators to them,” writes Gonzalez-Ramirez for The Cut. Those who are disturbed by the recent case of Adriana Smith – like this author – may not realize how often bodies are used as incubators through normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) for organ donation. For those unaware, doctors […]
Meet your new medical ethicist: ChatGPT
By Daniel Sokol In February 2023, I wrote on this forum about a new honesty test for doctors.[1] Developed with an experienced clinical psychologist, the test was a Situational Judgement Test of 22 real-life scenarios involving truth-telling problems. The ‘correct’ answers were determined by six professors of medical ethics who were also medical doctors. To […]
Why health inequality is not good enough
By Lasse Nielsen. Mildred and Meagan lead different lives. Mildred resides in an affluent and socially privileged neighbourhood, comes from a higher-middle-income household and is out of a well-educated family. Meagan, on the other hand, is from a non-educated, working-class background, out of a low-income family and lives in a much less salubrious area. What […]
Efficiency and Education: Finding Harmony in AI-Driven Medical Notes
By Trisha Nagin Artificial Intelligence (AI) scribing technology has been praised as a revolutionary tool in modern healthcare. It can be seen as an answer to the long-standing problem of physician burnout caused by documentation. By listening in on doctor-patient conversations and generating clinical notes automatically, the technology is designed to save time, increase efficiency, […]
Making healthcare decisions for patients with a disorder of consciousness: We have no idea what we are doing, should not pretend we do, and should prioritise their treatment
By Charles Foster In a recent article in the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience Clarke et al provide a welcome and sophisticated counter to much of the dogmatic literature relating to the making of healthcare decisions for a person with a disorder of consciousness (‘PDOC’). They take into account many factors that are often ignored […]