By Daniel Villiger. Last year, the German crime series Tatort, which belongs to the most watched television shows in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, aired an episode that takes place in the psychedelic underground. In his mansion, a spiritually-oriented psychiatrist hosts psychedelics sessions for his patients or, rather, his followers. Little surprisingly for a crime story, […]
Latest articles
Kant, “our” prophet?
By Ezio Di Nucci The other day, after an ethics class at the medical school, a student wanted to know why they had to study Kant. I am used to scepticism about the place of philosophy within the medical curriculum; and I am sympathetic to calls for a more diverse reading list, but this turned […]
Curiosity gone too far: a cautionary tale about snooping
By Wilson Dunlop [Pseudonym]. Just two weeks into my third-year of medical school, I committed a grave sin. I was alone in my room on my laptop, familiarizing myself with the software that powered the electronic health record (EHR). It was like any other night—a mixture of laziness and productivity and needless juggling between my […]
Overcoming impediments to medically assisted dying: A signal for another approach?
By Juergen Dankwort. The proposal to provide assistance with voluntary assisted dying (VAD) has grown significantly over the past two decades at an accelerating rate. Right-to-die movement societies and organizations now number over 80 from around the world, 58 of which are members of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies. However, most are […]
College vaccine mandates benefitted students and society
By Leo Lam and Taylor Nichols. The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted the operation of our society. To cope with a novel virus to which humans had no immunity, public health authorities took a multitude of actions such as lockdowns, mandates on non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks, and later on vaccines in specific circumstances to […]
To breach or not to breach a patient’s confidentiality? A case study in the colorectal clinic
By Daniel Sokol. A patient presents to the colorectal clinic with bleeding from the rectum. “Doctor”, he says sheepishly, “I must tell you that I have sex with my dog.” Intercourse with an animal, once known as ‘buggery with an animal’, is a criminal offence under s69 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, with a […]
Abortion and regret
By Anthony McCarthy Some women regret their abortions. Does this tell us anything interesting about whether abortion is, morally or prudentially, a choice worth making? A number of empirical papers have assessed the prevalence of abortion regret, reporting that a large majority of women do not regret their abortions. While use of the Turnaway Study data […]
Re-thinking consent for treatment: clinical interests and the public interest
By Abeezar I. Sarela. In its recent guidance on consent, the General Medical Council (GMC) advises doctors to not provide treatment that ‘you (the doctor) don’t think would be in their (the patient’s) clinical interests’. It follows that doctors should only provide treatments that are in the patient’s clinical interests. But, what exactly is meant […]
Have ethicists overlooked obvious benefits of financial incentives for antipsychotics?
By Nathan Hodson. It is late evening on an acute psychiatry ward and I’m the on-call doctor responsible for clerking a new patient with acute psychosis. I look in the notes and see that despite a history of detention for paranoid schizophrenia, he has been well on an antipsychotic depot for 5 years. Why relapse […]
It seems important to study public values regarding priority setting principles, but why exactly?
By Erik Gustavsson and Lars Lindblom. If you visit a conference or workshop on priority setting there will most certainly be several slots on empirical studies exploring public values about principles for priority setting. Over the last 20 years, there has been numerous such studies, and the interest among researchers to perform such studies accentuated […]