Guest Post: Hanna Pickard and Steve Pearce Responding to: Harm may sometimes be a good thing? Patrick Sullivan Sullivan’s emphasis on the importance of supporting autonomy and independence among vulnerable people who self-injure is fundamental to good clinical practice. This is why some forms of harm minimization, such as encouraging reflection, responsibility, safe cutting and where appropriate […]
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Combating Doping in Sports: More of the Same or What?
Guest Post: Bengt Kayser and Jan Tolleneer Paper: Ethics of a relaxed antidoping rule accompanied by harm-reduction measures Doping in sports continues to be prominently present in the media. Regularly ’scandals’ surface that then trigger flurries of articles, documentaries and reactions in the media. The general tone is one of moral opprobrium, dopers are considered deviant […]
Bridging the Education-action Gap: A Near-peer Case-based Undergraduate Ethics Teaching Programme
Guest Post: Dr Selena Knight and Dr Wing May Kong Paper: Bridging the education-action gap – a near-peer case-based undergraduate ethics teaching programme Medical ethics and law is a compulsory part of the UK undergraduate medical school curriculum. By the time they qualify, new junior doctors will have been exposed to ethics teaching in lectures and […]
Professional Codes and Diagnosis at a Distance
This is the second part of my response to Trish Greenhalgh’s post on the propriety of medics, psychiatrists in particular, offering diagnoses of Donald Trump’s mental health. In the last post, I concentrated on some of the problems associated with making such a diagnosis (or, on reflection, what might be better called a “quasi-diagnosis”). In […]
Diagnosing Trump
It doesn’t take too much time on the internet to find people talking with some measure of incredulity about Donald Trump. Some of this talk takes the tone of horrified fascination; some of it is mocking (and is accompanied by correspondingly mocking images); and some people are wondering aloud about his mental health. In this […]
Chappell on Midwives and Regulation
Richard Yetter Chappell has drawn my attention to this – a blog post in which he bemoans the Nursing and Midwifery Council’s rules about indemnity insurance, and the effects that they’ll have on independent midwives. (I’d never heard of independent midwives – but an IM – according to Independent Midwives UK – is “a fully […]
The Importance of Disambiguating Questions about Consent and Refusal
Guest Post: Rob Lawlor Re: Cake or death? Ending confusions about asymmetries between consent and refusal Imagine you have an adolescent patient who is in need of life saving treatment. You offer him the treatment, assuming that he would consent, but he refuses. As he is not yet a competent adult, you decide to treat […]
HIV Cure Research and The Dual Aims of the Informed Consent Process
Guest Post: Danielle Bromwich and Joseph Millum Paper: Informed Consent to HIV Research Special Issue: The benefit/risk ratio challenge in clinical research, and the case of HIV cure A cure for HIV would be tremendously valuable. Approximately 37 million people worldwide are HIV-positive and 15 million are currently on antiretroviral therapy. Until recently it was assumed […]
Politicians, Delusional Managers and the Future of the NHS: Have NHS Leaders Failed to “Speak Truth unto Power”?
Guest Post by David Lock QC [NB: This is a slightly longer version of a post that appeared on the BMJ blog earlier today.] Politicians, delusional managers and the future of the NHS: have NHS leaders failed to “speak truth unto power”? This blog is not a rant – well not too much of a […]
A Matter of Life and Death
Guest Post by Professor Lynn Turner-Stokes Re: A matter of life and death – controversy at the interface between clinical and legal decision-making in prolonged disorders of consciousness In an article published in the JME, I highlight the confusion that exists amongst many clinicians, lawyers and members of the public about decisions with withdraw life-sustaining treatments […]