Guest post by Sorcha Uí Chonnachtaigh I am going to, rather controversially, agree with one aspect of the statements of pro-life activists commenting on this case. That is not something I thought I’d ever say. Like, ever ever. A statement issued by Youth Defence (one of Ireland’s most radical pro-life organisations) made the valid point that “Irish doctors are […]
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Enhancing the ill: The therapy-enhancement…
By David Hunter This post is in effect a gauntlet, a challenge for those who are significantly bothered by enhancements, such that they think that enhancing would be unethical or at least that there is a significant ethical difference between the two, largely because I can’t really work out what the fuss is and would […]
Kelly Hills, Data Miner
Kelly Hills has been data-mining – collecting and collating information about the frequency with which certain terms appear in paper titles in three journals: the JME, Bioethics, and the AJoB. I was going to say that the charts are not much use, but that they are pretty and quite cool; and I was going to […]
Neonatal Withdrawal of Treatment: A Doctor Writes…
There’s a great little article recently published in the BMJ about what it’s like to be the medic considering withdrawal of feeding from a neonate. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was 10 days. I had no idea it’d be that […]
All Right, Peter: I’ll Bite
Over at the CMF blog, Peter Saunders has a slightly peculiar post. He begins by criticising Today programme presenters for not being hard enough with someone whose husband had gone to Dignitas; but then turns his attention – via a jibe at the rights made-to-order all-purpose bogey man, the “liberal elite” – to what he calls […]
198!
Seriously! Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics has published a paper with a hundred and ninety-eight listed authors! I’ve always been slightly puzzled by multi-authored papers – by just how many people get to add their names to a piece of work. A friend of mine who is a proper scientist once tried to explain how it works in […]
Book Review: Tom Koch, “Thieves of Virtue: When Bioethics Stole Medicine
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012; 352 + xx pp Guest Post by Robert Rivers (PhD student, Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Program, University of British Columbia) Who benefits presenting scarcity as a natural state in health care? Who killed the Hippocratic Oath? Why are doctors portrayed as paternalistic? Why has patient care become a secondary concern to […]
Modesty, Conscience, and What it Takes to be a Doctor (with a bit of Comedy)
Two apparently unrelated new and new-ish papers in the JME have caught my eye over the last few days. One of them is this one: Salilah Saidun’s “Photographing Human Subjects in Biomedical Disciplines: An Islamic Perspective”. We’ll come to the other in a little while. There’s a couple of puzzling things about the paper. One is […]
Junk food feeders are criminal child abusers? Really?
By David Hunter Public Service Announcement: Sensitivity Advisory Sticker – Caution Post contains sarcasm. In the interests of our more sensitive readers not taking offence I recommend they skip this post on the grounds that it will contain gentle sarcasm, disagreement and a certain amount of me asking “Is that really what they mean to […]
William Mager is having a Cochlear Implant.
And he’s going to blog about the experience. On Tuesday 6th November at around 7.30am I’ll be in a hospital room while a surgeon uses a marker pen to draw a line behind my ear. Soon after that, I’ll be wheeled into an operating theatre where they’ll make a small incision behind my ear, following […]