Guest post by Daniel Sokol, barrister at 12 King’s Bench Walk / King’s College London. Eight years after coming into force, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 has finally reached the scrutiny of the Supreme Court in Aintree University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust v James [2013] UKSC 67. David James was a professional musician, and a family […]
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So THAT’s where I’ve been going wrong…
Blogging here has been a little sparse for the last few months; I’d like to be able to blame it all on the pressures of work, but this post suggests that it might be otherwise: some combination of not getting up at the crack of dawn, and not smoking, seems to be a factor: Apparently, […]
An Attack of the What-Ifs
Among the comments to the last post, there’s this from Parmenion59: So…if a cure for lung cancer is found, and the study has been funded through money from a tobacco company…the BMJ won’t publish said study? Way to go BMJ. Hmmm. At least on the face of it, this looks like an important point – […]
Smoking out Tobacco Industry-Supported Research
BMJ Open, along with a couple of other journals, published a statement a couple of days ago saying that they’d no longer accept papers based on research wholly or partially funded by the tobacco industry. The gloss on the statement is damning: The tobacco industry, far from advancing knowledge, has used research to deliberately produce ignorance […]
How to write a crap essay/paper in bioethics – or how to write bioethics to be published in medical journals…
By David Hunter I’ve been considering writing a reflective piece about the general quality of bioethics papers in medical journals, focusing on how the medium (the audience and the severe word limits) impacts on the message and its quality – possibly as a bit of a moan since I’ve not yet managed to get a […]
Biases in Clinical Ethics Consultation
Guest post by Morten Magelssen, Reidar Pedersen, and Reidun Førde Read the full paper here. A difficult case involving a patient in an intensive care unit is brought to a clinical ethics consultant. The ethics consultant argues that intensive care is futile and should be withdrawn. The clinicians are grateful for the advice, and, with […]
Under-Treatment, Treated.
Right: file this paper from the JAMA under “Properly Odd”. It’s a proposal that nonadherence to a treatment regime be classed as a treatable medical condition in its own right. No, really. Look at the title: “Medication Nonadherence: A Diagnosable and Treatable Medical Condition”. Starting from the fairly straightforward premise that non-adherence to treatment regimes is “a […]
How Magic can help Teach Students about Medical Ethics
Guest post by Daniel Sokol, KCL For some time, I have been interested in the relationship between magic and medical ethics. Five years ago, I gave a talk in Prague on how to use magic in medical ethics education. More recently, I held a workshop on Magic for Anaesthetists, which touched on ethical issues in […]
Consent and Treatment Cascades: The case of giving birth
By David Hunter Apologies for my long absence – moving to Australia turned out to take up quite a bit of time, and make it hard for me to access and write on the blog… Still now I am here and in far more practical role than my previous appointment (I’m now in a medical […]
Research Ethics and Ethical Problems
Noted on Ben Goldacre’s twitter feed a couple of weeks ago was this article in Slate about the recruitment of pregnant women into drug trials. Essentially, there’s a situation in which there’s a dearth of information about the impact of drugs during pregnancy. According to the article, [p]harmaceutical companies are not willing to navigate the […]