By Daniel B. Kramer, Elizabeth Roe and Efthimios Parasidis. Regulators charged with evaluating new medical devices face several unenviable trade-offs. Extensive pre-market evaluation may delay market entry for useful technology, but a rushed assessment may fail to identify important safety concerns. Rigorous post-market studies may help balance these competing concerns, but must also weigh the […]
Latest articles
Is it irrational not to have a plan? Should there have been national guidance on rationing in the NHS?
By Dominic Wilkinson and Jonathan Pugh. Last April, in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of academics, lawyers, doctors and ethicists wrote publicly about the need for national ethical guidance relating to resource allocation (e.g., see here, here, here). At the time there was concern that there would be insufficient intensive care […]
Modern healthcare and trusting LGBT testimony
By Maura Priest Historically speaking, medical experts have dismissed, downplayed, and doubted, LGBT testimony. Along these lines, it was just a short time ago that the medical community understood LGBT identities as illnesses to be treated and cured. While both societal acceptance of the LGBT community, and also LGBT healthcare, have improved over time, even […]
Is the conceptualisation of trust in NHS’ code of conduct for artificial intelligence problematic?
By Soogeun S Lee. In 2018, the UK government published a Code of Conduct, hereafter the Code, for using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the NHS. The Code contains ten principles that outline a gold-standard of ethical conduct of AI developers and implementers within the NHS. Considering the importance of trust in traditional medical practice, […]
Who should get to choose their surrogates?
By Mark Christopher Navin, Jason Adam Wasserman, Devan Stahl, and Tom Tomlinson, Clinical ethics consultants regularly witness something like the following progression: A patient is determined to lack decision-making capacity (DMC). In the absence of an Advanced Care Planning document that names a surrogate decision maker (e.g. a Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care), […]
Discrimination on the basis of vaccination status (is inherently wrong)
By Michael Kowalik. The worldwide spread of SARS-CoV-2 has re-invigorated the debate about the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates and immunity certification. Public attitudes towards this complex issue are nevertheless dominated by fear, half-truths and ungrounded value-judgements, limiting the scope of rational deliberation in favour of ideological partisanship. My paper, ‘Ethics of Vaccine Refusal’, is […]
Self-experimentation with vaccines
By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu. A group of citizen scientists has launched a non-profit, non-commercial organisation named ‘RaDVaC’, which aims to rapidly develop, produce, and self-administer an intranasally delivered COVID-19 vaccine. As an open source project, a white paper detailing RaDVaC’s vaccine rationale, design, materials, protocols, and testing is freely available online. […]
Should trans girl Ellie Anderson be allowed to have children posthumously?
By Joona Räsänen Ellie Anderson died at the age of 16. Ellie’s unexpected death left her mother, Louise, grappling not only with the grief of losing her child but with a complex problem. Ellie wanted to have children – there is nothing unusual in such a desire. However, Ellie’s case is challenging in many ways. […]
Is there only one Mental Capacity Act – or are there two?
By Mike Stone I repeatedly come across, in guidance and protocols written by clinicians and clinical bodies, the claim or implication that 999 paramedics make ‘THE decision’ about CPR. And that relatives and family-carers, merely contribute to the decision-making of paramedics. I must ask: where does that belief, come from? Imagine a relative and a […]
In defence of social egg freezing
By Thomas Søbirk Petersen. In my latest JME article I defend social egg-freezing. Social egg freezing (or ‘non-medical egg freezing’) is, roughly speaking, the process whereby healthy women freeze their eggs to preserve their future fertility for reasons that have nothing directly to do with medical issues. However, some feminist bioethicists worry that women’s legal […]