By Sara Filoche, Peter Stone, Fiona Cram, Sondra Bacharach, Anthony Dowell, Dianne Sika-Paotonu, Angela Beard, Judy Ormandy, Christina Buchanan, Michelle Thunders, and Kevin Dew Have you ever been a patient where you felt that a healthcare practitioner was merely talking at you, rather than with you? Or that your opinion (or value) didn’t count? If […]
Latest articles
A sexual rights puzzle, un-puzzled!
By Steven J. Firth and Ivars Neiders The debate over sexual rights for the disabled is of profound political, ethical, and philosophical importance. In a recent debate in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Steven J. Firth argues for a welfare founded ‘sex doula’ programme. This blog post stands as a criticism of Di Nucci’s response to […]
William Osler’s lasting influence on medical ethics
Originally posted on the BMJ Opinion By Daniel Sokol One hundred years ago, on 29 December 1919, Sir William Osler died in Oxford from a haemorrhage following an operation to treat his empyema. He was 70. In his obituary of Osler in the New York Evening Post two days later, the celebrated haematologist Richard Cabot wrote: “I doubt […]
Justifying the Consequences of Trainee Medicine
By Connor Brenna and Sunit Das. Are we doing the best we can for our patients? At face-value, this seems to be a straightforward (albeit broad) question. In this piece, we dive deeper into the ethics of trainee medicine to find that the answer is really contingent on how one interprets who it is that […]
Privacy and health data: How can we protect information after it’s been shared?
By T.J. Kasperbauer. We have already lost significant control of our health data. To some, that means we’ve also lost our privacy. But there are many ways of protecting health data even after it has been shared. When health data are widely shared, we must develop strategies for protecting health data regardless of who can […]
The errant ways we talk about brain death
By Jordan Potter and Jason Lesandrini On November 4, 2019, newspapers across the USA reported on the tragic and untimely death of Mr. Nebane Abienwi – a 37-year-old asylum-seeking migrant from Cameroon who died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after suffering a brain hemorrhage. Per an ICE report, physicians at Sharp […]
Caring for each other through the ethical challenges of MAiD in Canada
By Mary Kathleen Deutscher Heilman and Tracy J. Trothen Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) generates strong emotions among Canadians. What has been striking to us is the fact that while academics have been engaged in an epic battle about who has a right to what protections under the law, the average person seems to want […]
Conscientious objection and professional interpreters working in healthcare settings
By Nathan Emmerich and Christine Phillips. If one knows anything about the recent literature on conscientious objection in healthcare it is that there is a lot of it. Indeed, in the past few months two different journals have published special issues on the topic. Whilst this coverage is to be welcomed, and this complex topic […]
Unpacking freedom of conscience in light of obligatory referrals in Canadian healthcare
By Christina Lamb. The recent defeat of a freedom of conscience bill, Bill 207, in Alberta, Canada, highlights the ethical problem of effective referrals elsewhere in the country. Particularly in the jurisdiction of Ontario where in the past year, physicians have been mandated by their regulatory College of Physicians and Surgeons (CPSO) and the Ontario […]
Unnatural experiments
By Charles Weijer and Monica Taljaard. When government health programmes are studied in cluster randomized trials, should the health programme itself be considered “routine government care” and not part of the research, or is it a research intervention to be scrutinized by the research ethics committee? Watson and colleagues argue for the former position; we […]