Kelly Hills has been data-mining – collecting and collating information about the frequency with which certain terms appear in paper titles in three journals: the JME, Bioethics, and the AJoB. I was going to say that the charts are not much use, but that they are pretty and quite cool; and I was going to […]
Category: Resource
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 […]
William Mager is having a Cochlear Implant.
And he’s going to blog about the experience. On Tuesday 6th November at around 7.30am I’ll be in a hospital room while a surgeon uses a marker pen to draw a line behind my ear. Soon after that, I’ll be wheeled into an operating theatre where they’ll make a small incision behind my ear, following […]
Passive Euthanasia: A Cri de Cœur
Don’t worry: this isn’t another instance of me yammering on about the right to die or the right to induce death. I’ve recently received a parcel; it contained a copy of this book by Leanne Bell, which happened to fall open at p 204. On that page, you’ll find this passage: Active euthanasia involves a deliberate act […]
Jon Cogburn’s Plea to Grad Students (and Others)
[IB: I’m taking the liberty of copying in its entirety Jon Cogburn’s post on NewAPPS about submitting papers to journals, because it’s worth reading. He directs it to graduate students – but I think that the same point applies to anyone, especially if they’re new to the field in which they’re writing. Since a lot […]
CFP: “Neurotechnological Interventions: Therapy or Enhancement”
Submissions (of 300 words max) are invited for inclusion at the TILT authors’ workshop on the theme of “Neurotechnological Interventions: Therapy or Enhancement” in Tilburg on 15-16th November 2012. The workshop is part of the FP 7 RoboLaw project, and will lead to the publication of a volume with papers. Abstracts shoud describe briefly how the […]
You’re Worth more Dead than Alive
Via MedicalTranscription.net, here’s a rather fabulous little infographic about the value – well, the price – of transplant organs. (Update: moved below the fold, because otherwise you have the time to grow a liver in a petri-dish before the page has loaded.) […]
A Very Small Amount of Relevance
Some very strange papers have just appeared in Bioethics regarding homeopathy. Not so long ago, the journal published a paper by Kevin Smith that advanced the claim that homeopathy is not only ineffective, but ethically problematic. The position taken was that homeopathy “ought to be actively rejected by healthcare professionals”, and that it is in fact ethically […]
CFP: Wellbeing and Public Policy
This may be of interest to readers… MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory – Ninth Annual Conference Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT), University of Manchester 5th – 7th September 2012 Workshop on Well-being and Public Policy: Call for Abstracts David Cameron, in a recent speech on introducing national measures of well-being to inform public policy, […]
A Small Solution for a Big Problem?
BioNews asked me to write something about Matthew Liao, Anders Sandberg and Rebacca Roache’s paper on engineering humanity to minimise global warming. I’d been meaning to for a while, so this was the prod I needed. Anyway: my take on their paper is here; but I thought I’d also reproduce it on this blog. What […]