By Derek Soled. Now, more than ever, countries around the world need good health policy. While more big data and efficiency are important, better integration of the humanities embodied in moral philosophy will help achieve this goal. In policymaking decisions, ethicists deserve a place at the table as their insights into human behaviour are essential […]
Latest articles
Beyond the initial Covid tsunami: (re)viewing the ethical challenges in balancing public health and the ongoing health needs of individuals and their families as NHS services are reset
By Caroline Redhead. The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the NHS have been profound. The cycle of starting, suspending and restarting routine services, which will be ongoing for some time and continue alongside normal winter pressures, is in itself a major incident for the NHS. As we moved from the acute and into the […]
Beware of medical service advertisements: They do not tell the whole story!
By Sung-Yeon Park and Max J Coppes. In 1975, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed an administrative complaint that the American Medical Association (AMA)’s ban on medical service advertising directly targeting consumers (medical advertising hereafter) was anti-competitive because it “prevented doctors from providing the public with truthful information about the price, quality, or other aspects […]
Is it acceptable to pay nothing or little to challenge trial participants?
By Sandro Ambuehl, Axel Ockenfels and Alvin E Roth. Concerns with (high) incentives feature prominently among ethicists. In the broad public and amongst economists, by contrast, there is much agreement that workers providing a service should be compensated fairly, and that work involving more discomfort and risk should be compensated more generously. This intuition extends […]
Consent and living organ donation
By Maximilian Kiener. Many people feel very gratified if they can donate an organ to their child or spouse in need. Others, however, are extremely frightened and secretly hope not to be compatible. In interviews, they admit to be ‘scared to death’ and ‘terrified all the way down.’ Yet, many of the most frightened eventually […]
Have enough people died?
By Ezio Di Nucci. You are probably tired of discussing COVID-19; but please bear with me because the question I want to address here is a bit unusual: not whether too many people have died because of the pandemic, but whether too few people might have actually died. No, that’s not a typo – but […]
Bad news about prognosis: why is it still so difficult?
By Nicola Grignoli. Today the team of the internal medicine ward asked me as a psychologist to participate in a family meeting: a patient with mental disorder was to be told of a life-threatening illness. We discussed whether the patient had to be present or if the bad news should be disclosed to the partner […]
Ensuring equity in vascularized composite allotransplantation
By Laura L. Kimberly, Elie P. Ramly, and Eduardo D. Rodriguez Vascularized composite allotransplantation (VCA) can be considered the innovative cousin of solid organ transplantation. VCA is the transplantation of multiple tissues, such as skin, muscle, nerve, and bone as a functional unit. This includes facial, upper and lower extremity, uterine, penile and abdominal wall […]
Medical ethics in the anthropocene – the health sector must divest from industries impacting planetary health
By Christian M. Schulz. The fifth mass extinction began 66 million years ago after an asteroid, measuring 10 kilometers in diameter, hit the peninsula of Yucatán. At the end of this huge loss of biodiversity, caused probably by ocean acidification, the most prominent victims were the dinosaurs. Currently, biodiversity is declining faster than at any […]
Frauds and misconduct in scientific research: a harsh lesson from the pandemic
By Erik Boetto and Davide Golinelli. Frauds and misconduct have been common in the history of science. A well-known example is that of former-doctor A.J. Wakefield, who published a study in 1998 reporting the association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and a syndrome of autism in children. Only in 2011 was it proven that […]