By Charlotte Blease. Every morning you feel like you’re in a dinghy in the middle of the sea. What is causing these horrendous dizzy spells? You turn to the ever-obliging Dr Google which offers a variety of possible causes. After refining your search, you suspect it could be an ear infection rather than something more […]
Latest articles
Physicians have a duty to climate protection, but beware: we all have!
By Henk Jasper van Gils-Schmidt and Sabine Salloch. In our article, “Physicians´ duty to climate protection as an expression of their professional identity”, we argue that physicians should undertake action to protect the climate. This question has our interest, as we observe a rising numbers of calls to action to climate protection addressing physicians. Yet, […]
To care or not to care
By Victoria Min-Yi Wang and Brian Baigrie. The idea for our paper, Caring as the Unacknowledged Matrix of Evidence-Based Nursing, germinated in a philosophy of medicine graduate class that Brian was teaching and Victoria was attending. As a group, we discussed what counts as evidence in medicine, how values do and should enter into clinical […]
Survival, dying well and intensive care
By Thomas Donaldson. Intensive care (ICU) medicine is amazing. When a disease causes a patient to become critically ill because their lungs, kidneys or cardiovascular system have started to fail, ICU treatments can take over the job of these organ systems to provide extra time for them to recover. Intensive care treatment has prevented the […]
Premature endings: Pregnancy loss and artificial placentas
By Victoria Adkins and Elizabeth Chloe Romanis. Our paper Artificial Placentas, Pregnancy Loss & Loss-Sensitive Care discusses the concept of pregnancy loss without procreative loss: this is how we can recognise the experience of loss formerly pregnant individuals may feel when their pregnancy ends prematurely, even if their foetus/premature infant survives. After articulating and exploring […]
From bytes to bedside: Exploring AI in medical ethics
By Michael Balas. In the swiftly advancing realm of artificial intelligence (AI), a tantalizing question emerges: can AI systems help us navigate the murky waters of medical ethics? Our recent study, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME), tackled this very question, and our findings were enlightening. At the heart of our research was […]
Threats to autonomy in uterus provision
By J. Y. Lee. In my recent extended essay published in JME, I argued that transitioning transgender men and cisgender women who do not wish to gestate should not be excluded from opportunities to autonomously provide their uterus in service of uterus transplantations (UTx). My argument was motivated by the fact that it is the norm […]
If only we’d known
By Edwin Jesudason. Lee Fierro was an actress who played Mrs Kintner in the Steven Spielberg classic “Jaws”. After slapping Chief Brodie, a sheriff with responsibilities for public safety, she cries: “I just found out that a girl got killed here last week and you knew, you knew there was a shark out there. You […]
Should ChatGPT be used to take consent from patients prior to surgery?
By Jemima Allen, Dominic Wilkinson, Brian Earp and Julian Koplin. Next month, you are due to have surgery on your knee. You’ve been on the waiting list for a while now, but the date for surgery is finally coming up. Normally, you would expect to speak to a member of the surgical team on […]
Twenty five years of the ‘Oregon model’ of assisted suicide: the data are not reassuring
By David Albert Jones. On 27 October 1997, ‘physician-assisted suicide became a legal medical option for terminally ill Oregonians’. There are now 25 years of reports on the implementation of the Death With Dignity (DWD) Act. These give some insight into how the practice has changed since it was first introduced. The reports are all […]