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 […]
Latest articles
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 […]
More Than Just Filler? Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Non-Surgical Cosmetic Procedures
By Natalie M Lane. High streets across the country may have been largely shuttered up over the past few months. But cast your mind back, and you’ll recall that it’s no longer just food, drink, and clothing on offer in the typical, bustling town centre – but lip plumping, skin smoothing, and cheek augmentation too. The […]
Lockdown of the elderly is misguided policy
By Franklin G. Miller. The Covid-19 pandemic poses policy challenges that may call for controversial measures. Savulescu and Cameron have recently argued in favor of “lockdown “of the elderly as a reasonable alternative to the population-wide lockdowns that have been implemented during the pandemic in various jurisdictions around the world. They claim correctly that such […]
The ethics of State-sponsored and clinical promotion of long-acting reversible contraception
Originally published in the BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health Blog. By Jeffrey Wale and Sam Rowlands. Global responses to the Covid-19 pandemic offer a good opportunity to re-examine the role of State actors (policymakers, regulatory bodies, clinical commissioning groups, service providers) and healthcare professionals in the promotion of health-related behaviours. Just how far should healthcare […]