It’s a while since I’ve said anything about drug policy, but a story in the BMJ a couple of weeks ago caught my eye. It would appear that the International Narcotics Control Board, a UN agency, has issued a report in which it advocates the prohibition of whole classes of substance: National governments need to […]
Category: BMJ
Hate the Sin, Operate on the Sinner
There’s a story in the BMJ about a German surgeon who refused to operate on an anaesthetised patient because he – the patient – had a swastika tattoo. The surgeon, it’s reported, was a Jew who couldn’t find it in his conscience to operate on anyone with Nazi sympathies. The head of the German Medical […]
My Homunculus Made Me Do It!
Many readers will be familiar with the “Sokal Hoax”, in which a nonsensical paper was submitted to, and accepted by, the journal Social Text, thereby demonstrating the vacuity of at least some PoMo theorising. Well, John MacLachlan has repeated the feat, having had a patently absurd abstract accepted for presentation at a conference on integrative […]
Risking Censure, and the Ontology of Misconduct
An article in a recent BMJ has caught my eye: Yates and James’ “Risk Factors at Medical School for Subsequent Professional Misconduct: Multicentre Retrospective Case-Control Study”. Based on an admittedly-small sample, it suggests that male sex, lower estimated social class, and poor early performance at medical school were independent risk factors for subsequent professional misconduct. […]
Open Access
Keith Taylor Tayler (sorry!), in a reply to the Purdy post below, raises the question of why journals are so expensive and inaccessible to those who don’t have institutional access. It’s a very good question – and one that Brian Leiter’s recently been mulling, too. (UPDATE: This is a point that applies equally well to […]
The ethics man strikes again – ethics checklists
Daniel Sokal has been busy again Success from surgical checklists breeds idea for ethical checks suggesting that clinicians ought to consider adopting an ethics checklist to use on their rounds. […]
How should we regulate research?
The BMJ is having it’s once yearly wrangle about the regulation of research in the UK: It’s time to change how Europe regulates research Many of the suggestions made and complaints are to some degree valid, the present system is cumbersome (though I think moving in the right direction in many ways such as the […]
What Can Doctors Do?
An area of research with which I’ve been toying for quite a long time now is to try to provide an answer to the question “What are doctors for?”. (Admittedly, the possibility of a cheap’n’nasty Heidegger pun in the title, Wozu Doktor?, has a reasonably high place in the list of the project’s attractions… Ho-hum. It’s […]