Guest post by Muriel R. Gillick When physician-law-professor, Jay Katz, published The Silent World of Doctor and Patient in 1984, shortly after I completed my medical residency, I felt he was speaking directly to me. He was telling me what kind of physician to be – not the old-school, paternalistic physician who told patients what treatment was best, […]
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We should not Prevent Some Depressed People from Access to Assisted Dying
Guest post by Udo Schuklenk We should not prevent some depressed people from access to assisted dying. Deborah E Gray, whose depression is (according to her account) successfully managed today, describes vividly on her website the impact depression had on her. She writes: you don’t feel hopeful or happy about anything in your life. You’re crying a […]
Is Age a Determinant Variable in Forgoing Treatment Decisions at the End of Life?
Guest post by Sandra Martins Pereira, Roeline Pasman and Bregje Onwuteaka-Philipsen Decisions to forgo treatment are embedded in clinical, socio-cultural, philosophical, religious, legal and ethical contexts and beliefs, and they cannot be considered as representing good or poor quality care. Particularly for older people, it is sometimes argued that treatment is aggressive, and that there may […]
Child Euthanasia: Should We Just not Talk about It?
Guest Post by Luc Bovens In 2014 Belgium passed a law that extends its euthanasia legislation to minors. There were strong parliamentary majorities in favour of this law but nonetheless a scream of “Murderers!” was heard in the public galleries of the Chamber of Representatives. What is the opposition like in Belgium? Euthanasia for adults has […]
Guest Posts and Tumbleweed
A quick editorial note: it’s been remarkably quiet here for a while. There’s no staggering reason for this: only that real life has got in the way of posting and also of getting guest posts published. (I can’t speak for David, but I assume that the same goes for him.) I think there’s about 4 or […]
How Can Journal Editors Fight Bias in Polarized Scientific Communities?
By Brian D. Earp In a recent issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Thomas Ploug and Søren Holm point out that scientific communities can sometimes get pretty polarized. This happens when two different groups of researchers consistently argue for (more or less) opposite positions on some hot-button empirical issue. The examples they give are: […]
My One Appearance in “Cosmo”…
… and they go and screw it up. A few weeks (months?) ago, I got a call from Cosmopolitan to ask if I’d talk about home-testing kits for genetics – stuff like what 23andMe offers. We talked, and I like to think that I said something useful… and promptly forgot all about it, until just now, […]
Animal Liberation: Sacrificing the Good on the Altar of the Perfect?
For my money, one of the best papers at the nonhuman animal ethics conference at Birmingham a couple of weeks ago was Steve Cooke’s.* He was looking at the justifications for direct action in the name of disrupting research on animals, and presented the case – reasonably convincingly – that the main arguments against the permissibility of […]
The Talking Cure Taboo
Guest post by C Blease Talking cures have never been so accessible. Since 2007 the UK government has invested £300 million launching its Improved Access to Psychological Treatments scheme. The goal is to train up to 4000 therapists in a particular branch of psychotherapy – cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT is the most widely researched […]
Incentives, Penalties, and Vaccination.
This popped up on my FB feed yesterday: a proposal from the Australian government that certain child welfare payments should be withheld from parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids based on “conscientious objection”. Parents who do not vaccinate their children will lose welfare payments of up to $2100 per child under a federal government […]