Apologies for my long absence – moving to Australia turned out to take up quite a bit of time, and make it hard for me to access and write on the blog… Still now I am here and in far more practical role than my previous appointment (I’m now in a medical school rather than […]
Category: clinical ethics
Emmerich on Fitness to Practise
Having asked out loud whether anyone could explain a couple of odd FtP decisions, I got this from Nathan Emmerich, offering sociological pop at an answer… Iain wondered if anyone could explain the morality that underlies a couple of recent Fitness to Practise decisions made by the GMC. Well, more accurately he wondered if anyone […]
Fitness to Practise Revisited
***UPDATE: Important codicil at the end*** Back in March, I posted something about what I took to be a slightly odd Fitness to Practise decision by the GMC in respect of one Mohammed Al-Byati. Via the BMJ, here’s another case that seems a bit strange: A doctor who abducted her six year old daughter from […]
Cutting Class: Thinking about Self-Harm without Disgust
Guest Post by Kerry Gutridge* and A.M. Calladine Imagine you are a doctor, nurse or teacher and someone in your care asks for a razor. The person you look after wants to slice into their own skin and draw blood. They are compelled to hurt themselves. They have an overwhelming urge to feel a momentary […]
Torture and Fitness to Practise
I’m running a bit late with this, but the BMJ reported last week that Mohammed Al-Byati had been suspended from the medical register for 12 months for complicity in torture. So far, the decision hasn’t been uploaded to the list of Fitness to Practise decisions, but the outline of the case is available here, on the […]
Even by the Mail’s Standards, this is Low
The Liverpool Care Pathway provides a rubric for managing the care of the terminally ill as they approach death. A helpful pamphlet explaining what it is and what it does is available here. Ideally, I’d quote the lot; but for the sake of efficiency, I’ll make do with an edited quotation: What is the Liverpool […]
Is Medical Equipment Halal? Kosher?
A recent intercalating student of mine got in touch with this query the other day: Total parenteral nutrition is given as a replacement for nutrition where the patient cannot or should not be digesting food: it is given intravenously so bypasses digestion. Two patients have asked my current educational supervisor if the TPN solution is […]
Neonatal Withdrawal of Treatment: A Doctor Writes…
There’s a great little article recently published in the BMJ about what it’s like to be the medic considering withdrawal of feeding from a neonate. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was 10 days. I had no idea it’d be that […]
Modesty, Conscience, and What it Takes to be a Doctor (with a bit of Comedy)
Two apparently unrelated new and new-ish papers in the JME have caught my eye over the last few days. One of them is this one: Salilah Saidun’s “Photographing Human Subjects in Biomedical Disciplines: An Islamic Perspective”. We’ll come to the other in a little while. There’s a couple of puzzling things about the paper. One is […]
Religious Preferences and the Best Interests of the Child
So the JME has – finally – published the paper by Brierley et al concerning withholding and withdrawal of futile treatment from children in the face of doctrinally-informed objections by the parents. It’s taken a while, but it’s there now. The essence of the paper’s claim is pretty simply put: if parental preferences run contrary to […]