By Sara Kolmes. Concepts of ‘body-rights’ allow us to discuss the kind of violation that occurs when people invade or harm our bodies, a violation that seems to go beyond merely harming something that belongs to us. Bioethicists have argued that people who use prosthetics have body-like rights to their prosthetics. This means that when […]
Latest articles
CoViD-19: Time to rethink the RCT and consider more efficient and ethical approaches to clinical knowledge acquisition
By Michael Keane. A recent, much publicized, randomized controlled trial (RCT) demonstrated that the corticosteroid, dexamethasone, reduced mortality from CoViD-19. This was hailed as a practice-changing breakthrough. The authors announced that “RECOVERY is a large, pragmatic, randomized, controlled adaptive platform trial designed to provide rapid and robust assessment of the impact of readily available potential […]
Covid-19: value-based policy making
By Jonathan Michaels. While claiming to be ‘following the science’ politicians in many countries have implemented a range of widely differing policies in relation to Covid-19. This week, the UK government has reopened various parts of the economy in England, including pubs and restaurants, hairdressers and cinemas. Evidence-based decision making is not value-free. In framing […]
Finding the space for ethics during a global crisis
By Mary Hall, Deborah Mbofana, Merryn Ekberg, and Mitch Harper The concept of emergency preparedness is based on the need to act rather than plan, to be able to pick up and run with a ready prepared, detailed plan. In the UK, the Emergency Preparedness and Emergency Response and Recovery sections of The Civil Contingencies […]
Evidence-based injustices
By Jonathan Michaels. In healthcare, and many other areas of endeavour, policy and guidance claim legitimacy on the basis that they are evidence-based and follow the best scientific advice. Expert advisory committees collect, consider and interpret extensive, and often complex, scientific evidence. As we have seen in the diverse responses to Covid-19, evidence and expertise […]
Toward enhanced consent for psychedelic psychiatry
By William R Smith. and Dominic Sisti. Imagine living with treatment-resistant depression. You’ve already tried several lines of medication, electroconvulsive therapy, and psychotherapy to no avail. You might have even have used augmentation strategies such as transcranial magnetic stimulation. Maybe you have spent years of your life struggling with this disease despite these attempts; maybe […]
Does euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide disrespect the disabled?
By Philip Reed. According to the way people commonly talk, laws and social practices can express certain messages. We might say that a strict immigration policy expresses an unwelcome message and disrespect to immigrants. Or a law that requires employers to provide paid family leave expresses encouragement for people to have children. This idea is […]
Clamping down on unethical research: time for a moratorium on publishing Chinese transplant research
By Wendy A Rogers, Angela Ballantyne, Wendy C Higgins, Wendy Lipworth. Our paper in JME investigates the pros and cons of publishing and/or retracting unethical biomedical research. We focus on Chinese transplant research using organs procured from non-consenting executed prisoners. However, this is not the only topic currently raising questions about the justifiability of publishing […]
Immunity passports – reopening the economy and repackaging racism
By Natalie Kofler and Françoise Baylis In the midst of worldwide protests against anti-Black racism and violent policing, private companies and governments are developing a novel platform for discrimination that would effectively increase the reach of law enforcement into public society – so called, digital “immunity passports”. It all starts with a seemingly innocuous plan […]
Can research participants break from the chain of traditional data sharing consent?
By Vasiliki Rahimzadeh In their recent article, Mann et al. propose to share biomedical research data more widely, securely and efficiently using blockchain technologies. Used to power cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, blockchain and the wider group of distributed ledger technologies provide new ways of exchanging data, including sensitive data such as health data, in that […]