Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
It doesn’t seem like much—hardly an offence. A national medical association calling attention to the public health consequences of armed conflict. Business as usual, surely? But not in Turkey. Not under Erdoğan. In January, the Turkish Medical Association warned of the health consequences of the Syrian incursion. Now all 11 members of its Council are […]
The award-winning cinema documentary Unrest explores the stories of people living with ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Ahead of its UK theatrical release on 20 October, Julian Sheather, Specialist Adviser, Ethics and Human Rights at the BMA, says the film raises important issues for the medical community. What do we mean by illness? What is a disease? […]
What we are witnessing is war without restraint. But what do we do to stop it? […]
When we sicken in the UK most of us turn to the NHS for care. The majority of doctors here have also been trained in the NHS. Medicine in the UK is therefore deeply involved with the state. Modern developed states are both powerful and, to an extent, impersonal. They can be an enormous force […]
In times of war, said Cicero, the law falls silent. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Yemen. Somalia. Ukraine. Libya. Chad. An irregular patchwork of violent conflict lies across great swathes of the globe. Many of these are new kinds of conflict. The clash of opposing armies has given way. Splinter groups, proxies, irregular forces, insurgents, paramilitaries. It […]
Medical involvement in torture looks like a category error. Medicine has to do with the healing of bodies and minds; torture with their destruction. It is now forty years since the World Medical Association (WMA) adopted the Declaration of Tokyo on Guidelines for Physicians Concerning Torture. It was necessary then. The tragedy is how necessary […]
Very difficult to know how we will approach our death until we are in the shadow of it. Will we hold to the ideals we formed when we were healthy, or will fear, or pain, or desperate hope overturn them? There is an interesting blog touching on this theme over at the New York Times. […]
Will the confluence of big data and the genomics revolution lead to a transformation in personalized healthcare, or are the emperors’ clothes looking a little threadbare? This was the theme of the Astellas Innovation Debate for 2015, held in the Royal Institution’s lovely raking lecture theatre in Albermarle Street. George Freeman, Minister for Life Sciences, […]
In August 2012, Claudia was woken at 3:00 in the morning when soldiers burst into her home in Veracruz City, Mexico. They tied her hands and blindfolded her. They took her to the local naval base where they tortured her: they subjected her to repeated electric shocks, then they wrapped her in plastic, and beat […]
Drako Oho Zarhazar has anterograde amnesia, a rare brain disorder that has left him unable to form new memories. The distant past—episodes from before the traumas that disabled his mind: a motorcycle accident; his car crushed beneath the wheels of a monster truck—remains to some degree with him, but he can hold almost no memory […]