By Mariam O. Fofana, On September 14 2020, the news broke that Dawn Wooten, a former nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC), a privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, had blown the whistle regarding coerced sterilization of women at the facility. Wooten reported an alarmingly high rate of hysterectomies sometimes performed […]
Latest articles
A kind of care: sexual intimacy for older adults in long term care
By Vanessa Schouten. How sexual intimacy is conceptualized matters, and this is particularly true for people whose decisions are shaped by the fact that they live in a communal facility under the care of others, such as older adult residents of long-term care facilities. As one of the participants in our study pointed out, intimate […]
Urgency, Delayed Decision-making and Ethics in the Court of Protection
By Dominic Wilkinson. [Cross post from the Practical Ethics blog] On 11th June 2021, I was a public observer (via MS Teams) of a case in the Court of Protection: Case No. 1375980T Re GU (also blogged about by Jenny Kitzinger here). The case was (though I did not know it beforehand) related closely to issues that I […]
“I am used to my happy life, not this” – why mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for care home staff is an essential humanitarian and ethical intervention
By Ayesha Ahmad. When traditional healers heal, they empathise with the pain being endured. The traditional healer is distinguished by their strength and ability to channel the suffering through, and beyond, them. What this shows is that there is a distinction between the person who is a healer and the person who is being healed. […]
Medical complicity in torture
By Derek Summerfield. During the Middle Ages in Europe the practice of torture drew distinction from its association with confessed truth, repentance, and salvation, yet by 1874 Victor Hugo could write that “torture has ceased to exist.” However there has never been any doubt that torture would outlive its obituarists. As I record in my […]
Do doctors engaging in advocacy speak for themselves or their profession?
By Elizabeth Lanphier In the United States, where I live and work, it is common for physicians to speak out on a variety of topics both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, physicians advocate against gun violence as a matter of public health. Pediatricians become #tweetiatrician on social media to raise awareness about […]
The value of COVID challenge trials for diverse populations
By Nir Eyal and Tobias Gerhard Perhaps the strongest argument against COVID challenge trials posits that they must choose between the Scylla of insufficient safety for volunteers and the Charybdis of insufficient social value. In particular, challenge trials that exclude old or unhealthy participants for their own safety may involve surprisingly low risk, but they […]
Paying more for highly specialised technologies: equity or profligacy?
By Jonathan Michaels The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recently consulted on possible revisions to its processes for health technology evaluation. An important aspect of the proposed changes related to topic selection criteria for the Highly Specialised Technologies (HST) programme. This is of great commercial interest as it allows some technologies to […]
Civil commitment for opioid misuse: The need for an ethical use framework
By John C Messinger, Daniel J Ikeda, Ameet Sarpatwari In the 12 months prior to September 2020, there were over 66,000 fatal opioid overdoses in the United States, a 36% increase over the previous year. Many scholars have hypothesized that this dramatic rise was driven at least in part by conditions brought on by the […]
Does it work what clinical ethicists do – and how do we evaluate it?
By Joschka Haltaufderheide, Stephan Nadolny, Jochen Vollmann, and Jan Schildmann. Clinical ethical case consultations have been widely implemented in clinical practice. It has been hailed as important tool to support clinical decision making. At the same time, it is a matter of debate what ethical case consultations actually do contribute to clinical practice and what […]