A letter in The Times today considers the duty of doctors to ease the dying process, in the light of the Debbie Purdy case. Dr MS Ali wonders why “people like Debbie Purdy and others have to fear that they will not get the necessary assistance from the medical profession to relieve their suffering […]
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A fishy affair
By David Hunter Writing in his usual uncompromising style Ben Goldacre describes the latest carry-ons in the “trial” carried out in Durham by the Council on whether fish oils improve GCSE performance: You’ll remember the Durham fish oil “trial” story, possibly the greatest example of scientific incompetence ever documented from a local authority. Initially they […]
The ethics of abortion – De ja vue or necessary debate?
This summer I realised with some horror that it was 20 years ago I first presented a paper at an international medical ethics conference while still being a medical student. That paper was on who should control the fate of aborted foetuses and the paper I gave the year after at the same conference was […]
Hot on the newsstands…
The latest JME is out today… and I’d just like to draw everyone’s attention to the paper on facial allograft transplantation by Ben White and some random bloke who needs a haircut. This isn’t because I had anything to do with it, but because (a) it’s very good, and (b) it’s based on Ben’s dissertation […]
On Hospital Ethicists
At the beginning of August, Dan Sokol wrote a piece for the BBC news site in which he touched on the place of hospital-employed ethicists. Apparently, this is a reasonably common position in the States. I used to be of the opinion that hospital ethicists would be a good idea – when I was a student, […]
The Boundaries of Sanity
One of the topics to which I return every so often is ethics in psychiatry – particularly in the context of problems concerning how we decide whether someone is sane or insane. Julian Baggini ponders related topics here. Worth a few minutes, I think… […]
WoooOOOoooO!! Research!!
That “wooOOOooO” was the sound a ghost makes, just in case you were wondering. I’m not sure if what follows is more of a tale about woeful reporting, or woeful research. What I am more sure about is that many of you will have seen BBC reporting that “[a] large study is to examine near-death experiences in […]
The good old but somewhat cold days
By David Hunter Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber links to this 1958 piece of research on how children behaved when locked inside fridges… Using a specially designed enclosure, 201 children 2 to 5 years of age took part in tests in which six devices were used, including two developed in the course of this experiment […]
Food without much thought…
By David Hunter Something that always surprises me at bioethics conferences, especially given the number of vegetarians in the field, is the absence of quality or sometimes even any vegetarian food. Take the recent International Association of Bioethics (IAB) Congress in Croatia. The lunches were fairly awful especially for vegetarians (although the KFC looking chicken […]
Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 6. ed. – Nearing perfection?
It is rare to be able to review a book long before it is published. But my copy bears the publication year of 2009, even though I bought it in July 2008. Be that as it may, seven is the number of perfection so it is relevant to ask whether the 6th edition of Tom […]