By Kathryn Muyskens Interest in integrating traditional medicine with biomedicine is growing worldwide. From policy endorsements by the World Health Organization to national healthcare reforms, “integrative medicine” is increasingly framed as a pragmatic and culturally sensitive response to how patients actually seek care. Rather than choosing between medical traditions, many patients move fluidly between them. […]
Latest articles
Appetite apocalypse
By Professor Ed Jesudason We seem to spend a lot of time these days thinking about undue influence: scams perpetrated against the elderly or people looking for love; the possibility of coercion in assisted dying; our democracy undermined by money and sex scandal; society enraged and misled by social media algorithms. If alcohol is a […]
We’re angry at MrBeast for being honest
By Michał Białek MrBeast posted a video paying for 1,000 cataract surgeries, and people got their sight back. Another time he funded 100 wells in Africa, and people got access to clean water. Yet many people got somehow angry with this. “He’s exploiting vulnerable people,” some said. “He’s making money from suffering,” others argued. “It’s […]
Before we judge the preference
By Shadi “Sophie” Heidarifar When a patient requests a procedure shaped under constraints, including oppressive ones, we tend to evaluate the preference itself: whether it is autonomous, whether it reflects internalized norms, whether it has been formed under coercive conditions. This framing presumes that the central bioethical question concerns the status of a preference. In […]
Equity and ethnicity in the ICU: considering a reserve system when resources are scarce
By: Elizabeth Fenton, Esther Willing, Neil Pickering, Wenna Yeo, Sophie Barham The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the ethical limitations of ‘save the most lives’ as a prioritisation principle for intensive care (ICU) resources during times of scarcity, such as pandemics. A key problem is that following this principle can disadvantage patients with worse overall health, often […]
Medical ethics when ICE comes knocking
By G. Owen Schaefer Honesty and integrity are pillars of medical professionalism which I and many others teach to healthcare students. Sometimes, though, they can be in tension with other considerations – as illustrated in a distressing case study reported in Slate magazine, concerning medical decision-making in the US when ICE comes knocking. The case, […]
The ethics of Ant Afu: Health AI within China’s super-app ecosystem
By Miranda Qianyu Wang On 15 December 2025, Ant Group rebranded its healthcare app as “Ant Afu,” repositioning it from a diagnostic tool to an “AI Health Friend.” Embedded within Alipay – the digital payment platform used daily by over a billion people in China – Afu offers personalised health companionship and connects users directly […]
A Confucian virtue ethics approach to medical internship in Hong Kong
By Trevor T. W. Wan and Wai Tak Victor Li In Hong Kong, an internship, also called housemanship, is a 12-month period during which fresh medical graduates rotate across four departments in public hospitals and acquire hands-on clinical experience through daily care of patients. Yet this phase is fraught with inherent tension: interns, with relatively […]
Placebos and ethics in digital therapeutics
By Jacqueline Lutz & Lindsay Ayearst In applied digital health, questions about evidence generation are inseparable from how products are built and whether they ever reach patients. Many scientists working on digital therapeutics are academically trained to run controlled clinical studies, behavioral experiments, or to study specific behavioral intervention mechanisms. That rigor does not disappear […]
Considering the ethics of sedation, with an eye on euthanasia and treatment withdrawal
By Hitoshi Arima Today, many people spend their final days in a medically induced sleep. According to a survey conducted in Japan, just under 20 percent of people who die from cancer receive some form of sedation. Patients approaching death may experience extremely severe suffering. For example, a cancerous tumor may invade areas dense with […]