By L. Syd M Johnson When Brain Death/Death by Neurologic Criteria (BD/DNC) occurs during pregnancy, complex questions emerge concerning the moral and legal status of the brain dead pregnant person, the continuation of life-sustaining treatment to save a fetus, the exploitation of pregnant bodies, and the potential conflicts between the prior, autonomous wishes of pregnant […]
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Hi, I’m a hospice doctor. Here’s your bill.
By Jennifer Eitingon, MD, with Margaret P Battin, PhD When asked about the often serious ethical quandaries hospice providers are often faced when providing care for a patient nearing death, the one thing that plagues most is not the medical aspect of how to manage suffering, nor the existential questions of how we, as embodied […]
Adriana Smith is Far From the First Incubator
By Joel Cox & Allison Bajada “We’re just human incubators to them,” writes Gonzalez-Ramirez for The Cut. Those who are disturbed by the recent case of Adriana Smith – like this author – may not realize how often bodies are used as incubators through normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) for organ donation. For those unaware, doctors […]
Meet your new medical ethicist: ChatGPT
By Daniel Sokol In February 2023, I wrote on this forum about a new honesty test for doctors.[1] Developed with an experienced clinical psychologist, the test was a Situational Judgement Test of 22 real-life scenarios involving truth-telling problems. The ‘correct’ answers were determined by six professors of medical ethics who were also medical doctors. To […]
Why health inequality is not good enough
By Lasse Nielsen. Mildred and Meagan lead different lives. Mildred resides in an affluent and socially privileged neighbourhood, comes from a higher-middle-income household and is out of a well-educated family. Meagan, on the other hand, is from a non-educated, working-class background, out of a low-income family and lives in a much less salubrious area. What […]
Efficiency and Education: Finding Harmony in AI-Driven Medical Notes
By Trisha Nagin Artificial Intelligence (AI) scribing technology has been praised as a revolutionary tool in modern healthcare. It can be seen as an answer to the long-standing problem of physician burnout caused by documentation. By listening in on doctor-patient conversations and generating clinical notes automatically, the technology is designed to save time, increase efficiency, […]
Making healthcare decisions for patients with a disorder of consciousness: We have no idea what we are doing, should not pretend we do, and should prioritise their treatment
By Charles Foster In a recent article in the American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience Clarke et al provide a welcome and sophisticated counter to much of the dogmatic literature relating to the making of healthcare decisions for a person with a disorder of consciousness (‘PDOC’). They take into account many factors that are often ignored […]
Should we prefer synthetic to donated mitochondria?
By Iain Brassington, Daniela Cutas, Anna Smajdor and Adrian Villalba Suppose that you’re a woman who wants to have a child, but that you know you carry a mutation in your mitochondria that can be predicted, with reasonable certainty, to have a deleterious effect on the quality (and possibly length) of your offspring’s life. A […]
Abortion, Infanticide, and the Wrongness of Killing
By James G. Robinson What makes it wrong to kill a human being? A simple and commonly invoked answer is that human beings have a right to life and killing them would violate this right. For many ethicists, however, the right to life is not something that we all have simply because we are members […]
Mind for Sale: When Cognitive Function Becomes a Monthly Fee
By Guido Cassinadri In the first episode of the seventh season of Black Mirror, “Common People,” the story follows a couple in which the wife’s life is saved by an experimental therapy (spoiler incoming). The portion of her brain affected by an incurable tumor is replaced with synthetic tissue developed by the company Rivermind. The […]