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 […]
Latest articles
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 […]
In the best interests of the child – reporting restrictions in serious medical treatment cases
By Helen Turnham and Dominic Wilkinson Following the release of the judgment in Abbasi and Haastrup [2023] EWCA Civ 331 Abbasi and another (Respondents) v Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (Appellant); Haastrup (Respondent) v King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (Appellant) – UK Supreme Court, April 2025, a ripple of conversation and concern […]
Abortion in Germany – a (short) moment of hope for decriminalisation?
By Hilary Bowman-Smart, Christin Hempeler. The long-standing political and social debate around abortion has experienced a resurgence in many countries. Over the 20th century, significant progress has been made on reproductive rights, including access to abortion services. However, recent years have seen much of that progress falter or slide backwards. We saw the fall of […]
Weighing informed consent: COVID and Zambian HIV testing
By Benjamin Ferguson, Golden Mwinsa, Kasoka Kasoka, and Frances Griffiths UNAIDS 2023 figures estimate the incidence of HIV/AIDS in Zambia at 9.8%, one of the highest rates in the world. However, the country has made significant progress, halving infections over the past 25 years. Zambia now meets two of UNAIDS three 95% goals: 98% […]