James Wilson (UCL) and I recently wrote a briefing paper for the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on the ethical issues surrounding hyper-expensive treatments – that is treatments which exceed NICEs usual cut off point of £30000 per quality adjusted life year (qualy). One factor that we kept coming back to was the need to consider […]
Category: Tinfoil Hat
A New Standard for Medics: Perfection
Lord knows why, but I keep going back to Secondhand Smoke, the pro-life, global-warmin’-denyin’, public-healthcare-hatin’, intelligent-design-lovin’, Daily-Mail-quotin’ blog written by Discovery Institute affiliated lawyer Wesley Smith. I try to stay away, but like a child peeping between his fingers while hiding his eyes, I’m just fascinated by it. A recent post concerns a Kiwi woman […]
Ethics (without the brain?)
I’ve set my RSS to receive updates from Secondhand Smoke, which is one of the blogs at First Things. It’s written by Wesley Smith, who is affiliated to the Discovery Institute, the creationist thinktank in Seattle: that gives you an indication of the sort of position he occupies – not just on bioethics, but also […]
Odone and the CPS: Scaremongering about Euthanasia
The Centre for Policy Studies has recently published a report on euthanasia, authored by Cristina Odone. It’s available to download here, though it would seem that you can also buy a paper version for a tenner. It’s amazing for the sheer poverty of the argument; I might never have thought that so much specious nonsense […]
Slightly Gratuitous Abuse of the Blog…
Someone’s just asked me if it’d be possible to design a virus specifically to kill people with a certain given genetic signature. I have a feeling that the South African security services tried to cook up an ethnically specific biological agent in the ’80s, but am not sure whether this is an urban myth. Any […]
Mental Illness – even if it’s Gordon Brown’s – is not Interesting.
Dependably right-wing blogger Paul “Guido Fawkes” Staines has been circulating the idea that Gordon Brown may be taking anti-depressants – specifically, Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors – under the touching and understanding heading “Is Brown Bonkers?” and making some sniggering schoolboy allusions to Malcolm Tucker-like tantrums. This allegation – and quite why it’s an allegation is beyond me […]
Swine Flu enters X-Files Territory
It was only a matter of time before people started to come up with “evidence” that swine flu is all a hoax cooked up to allow the lizard illuminati Bildeberg New World Order freemasons to take over the world… and it’s happening now – this time courtesy of someone using the same name as a BMJ […]
The Telegraph has Got me Worried – or Given me an Investment Idea
A short time ago, I mentioned George Pitcher’s extraordinarily lame showing on the Today programme, when he was invited to talk about assisted suicide. I included a link to his blog – and, I admit it, this was partly intended so that he’d get an “incoming link” notification and either make a comment here, or refer […]