Guest post by Rebecca H. Li and Holly Fernandez Lynch One of the most important responsibilities of a clinical project lead at a biotech company or an academic research team is to generate clinical trial protocols. The protocol dictates how a trial will be conducted and details background information on prior research, scientific objectives, study […]
Latest articles
The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit
By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) * Note: this article was first published online at Quillette magazine. The official version is forthcoming in the HealthWatch Newsletter; see http://www.healthwatch-uk.org/. Introduction Science and medicine have done a lot for the world. Diseases have been eradicated, rockets have been sent to the moon, and convincing, causal explanations have been given for a whole range […]
Stay Classy, BMJ.
Lord only knows, it pains me to jump to George Osborne’s defence – more so by resurrecting a meme that was already past it when I was first invited to run this blog in 2008 – but on this one occasion, I’m going to have to do it. Last week, the BMJ reported about a case in […]
Zika, Gandhi and the CDC
Guest Post by Agomoni Ganguli Mitra Three pieces of news over the last weeks particularly troubled me. In the first, and perhaps most radical of them all, Latin American governments began to urge women not to become pregnant over the next couple of years, as a public health measure to restrict the number of children […]
Controversial Views on “FGM”
by Brian D. Earp / (@briandavidearp), with a separate guest post by Matthew Johnson Even the term is controversial. Female genital mutilation/FGM? Many women from societies that practice such traditional initiation rites find the term offensive. Female genital alteration? But that could refer to a wide range of procedures, including some that might be medically advised. Female […]
Should Junior Doctors Strike?
Guest Post by Mark Toynbee, Adam Al-Diwani, Joe Clacey and Matthew Broome [Editor’s note: Events in the real world have moved more quickly than David or I have; the facts of the junior doctors’ strike have moved on since the paper was published and this post submitted. Still, the matters of principle remain. – IB] A […]
*Reboot*
It’s been a while, what with marking and supervising and writing new courses and general faff, but with luck the blog’ll be getting updated a bit more frequently; there’s a couple of guest posts in the queue, the first of which I’ll post later today. And I’m hoping to restart semi-regular moans of my own […]
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Here’s an intriguing letter from one John Doherty, published in the BMJ yesterday: Medical titles may well reinforce a clinical hierarchy and inculcate deference in Florida, as Kennedy writes, but such constructs are culture bound. When I worked in outback Australia the patients called me “Mate,” which is what I called them. They still wanted me to be in […]
Pro-Lifers’ Arguments Might be their Greatest Gift to Pro-Choicers
Abortion is always going to be a controversial topic. For what it’s worth, I hold that there’s nothing wrong with it. That’s me speaking from my habitual non-consequentialist position. From a more utilitarian perspective, I’m willing to concede that, given the choice between world A, in which abortions happen, and world B, in which they don’t because […]
A Moral Imperative to Pursue Gene Editing Research?
A moral imperative to pursue gene editing research? The bioethicist Erik Parens has recently asked whether parents can be trusted with gene-editing technology, in a thought-provoking essay published in Aeon magazine. To set the stage, he writes that: “In April 2015, in the pages of Science, a group of prominent scientists and ethicists announced the […]