One thing I’ve been pondering lately is what we might use to refer to a gathering of bioethicists? […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
Salon Culture… in Manchester
I can’t remember how I found it, but I feel I ought to pimp the Manchester Salon, a debating forum in this here rainy part of the country. There seems to be a few events in coming months that are related to the concerns of this blog and journal, starting with one on assisted suicide […]
Internalising Incentives
I’ve recently been reading some work on health incentives – the kind of incentive that may be used to encourage people to pursue ostensibly desirable courses of action in return for some kind of reward (frequently monetary). Some schemes are aimed at promoting a vague healthy lifestyle, as when people are rewarded for losing weight […]
If you’re at a loose end in London…
I found myself yesterday at the Wellcome Collection, one of my favourite museums in London and somewhere I visit reasonably frequently (not being too big, and conveniently located on the Euston Road, it’s perfect to fill those odd hours between the end of the hangover and the train back to Manchester). The permanent exhibition has […]
Dan Sulmasy’s Crystal Ball
Dan Sulmasy has a piece on Bioethics Forum at the moment in which he considers the next 40 years of bioethics. It’s a curious piece, making six main claims or predictions about the future, to which I’ll return in a minute: but before that, I think it’s worth looking at his scene-setting: I suggest that bioethics […]
What’s the point of quarantine?
I’ve reached an important milestone: the first case of Pig Aids swine flu among people I know. It’s quite exciting. She’s been told to stay in, avoiding contact with others, for five days by one person, for 10 by another. I’m wondering why this is. In the early days of the illness, there might have […]
Cosmetic Surgery and the Purpose of Medicine
For quite a while now, I’ve had the idea that I’d like to write something about the purpose of medicine – it’s something I’ve been adding on job applications for about 5 years, but I’ve not got around to doing all that much about it yet. The question as I saw it was whether medicine […]
Snaf(l)u?
There’s been a lot of ink sneezed recently on how we should organise our response to H5N1 and, latterly, H1N1 – on questions of who should be top of the Tamiflu distribution list and on how the distribution should be organised. (To give a recent example, Dan Sokol touches on the question here.) However, one aspect […]
More on prayer…
Wouldn’t you know it, my favourite religious commentator (and I favour one religious commentator over another in the sense that I favour a hangover over a migraine or burst aneurysm) George Pitcher has weighed into the prayer on the wards coverage. Guess what? His opinions aren’t impressive. […]
Praying for patients? God help us.
Via the Press Association, the BBC has been reporting the motion to be discussed by the BMA conference that would explicitly seek to allow doctors to offer to pray for their patients. The full text of the motion is available via the Christian Medical Fellowship’s website. Right. Go and make a cup of tea. We […]