Guest Post: Michael S. Dauber, MA * Note: this article is being cross-posted at the Practical Ethics blog. In 2015, Sergio Canavero announced that he would perform a therapeutic head transplant procedure on a human subject by December 2017. Since then, he has recruited the assistance of surgeon Xiaoping Ren and switched from Valery Spiridonov to an […]
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Life and Death: Apples and Oranges?
Guest Post: Carl Tollef Solberg, Ole Frithjof Norheim and Mathias Barra Article: The Disvalue of Death in the Global Burden of Disease The global burden of disease (GBD) study is “a systematic, scientific effort to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and geographies for […]
Ethics of Fertility Preservation for Prepubertal Children: Should Clinicians Offer Procedures Where Efficacy is Largely Unproven?
Guest Post: Rosalind J McDougall, Lynn Gillam, Clare Delany, Yasmin Jayasinghe Article: Ethics of fertility preservation for prepubertal children: should clinicians offer procedures where efficacy is largely unproven? Should we offer a procedure with so little evidence? Isn’t it burdening a sick child without real justification? But it’s often low risk – if we don’t offer, are we depriving the […]
Pedophilia and Child Sexual Abuse Are Two Different Things — Confusing Them is Harmful to Children
By Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp) Note: this post appeared first at the Practical Ethics blog and is being re-posted. Pedophilia and Child Sexual Abuse Are Two Different Things — Confusing Them is Harmful to Children Republican politician Roy Moore has been accused of initiating sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl when he was in his early […]
Can Options Make Us Worse Off? Choice, Pressure, and Paid Kidney Donation
Guest Post: Julian J. Koplin Article: Choice, pressure and markets in kidneys Paying people to donate a ‘spare’ kidney might help alleviate the current shortage of transplantable organs. However, doing so would conflict with a principle widely accepted within the medical community since the earliest days of organ transplantation: that bodily organs should not be bought […]
The Libertarian Right to Test Genetically
Guest Post: Michele Loi Article: Direct to Consumer Genetic Testing and the Libertarian Right to Test Should individuals be permitted to access their own genetic data without the mediation of a medical professional? In ‘Direct to Consumer Genetic Testing and the Libertarian Right to Test‘, I argued that they should, provided that they bear […]
Conflicting Interpretations or Conflicting Opinions? Being Clear about the UN-CRPD
Guest Post: Matthé Scholten and Jakov Gather Article: Adverse consequences of article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for persons with mental disabilities and an alternative way forward When a patient is incompetent to make a particular treatment decision due to impaired decision-making capacity, it is common practice that the […]
Machine Learning and Medical Education: Impending Conflicts in Robotic Surgery
Guest Post by Nathan Hodson Research in robotics promises to revolutionize surgery. The Da Vinci system has already brought the first fruits of the revolution into the operating theater through remote controlled laparoscopic (or “keyhole”) surgery. New developments are going further, augmenting the human surgeon and moving toward a future with fully autonomous robotic […]
There’s a New Declaration of Geneva!
By Iain Brassington Contain your excitement if you can… The World Medical Association has issued its latest version of the Declaration of Geneva. (h/t to Mark Rapa for bringing this to my attention.) This is apparently something that it does every decade, tinkering with phrasing as it sees fit. So, then: what does it say? Well, […]
“Top of the Lake” may Sink as a Procedural, but Look Beneath the Surface
By Iain Brassington A couple of weeks ago, BioNews invited me to review Top of the Lake; but since it’s relevant to the kinds of things that appear in the JME, I thought I’d repost it here. There’s a moment in the final episode of this second series of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake where Nicole […]