It was reported a couple of weeks ago that researchers had found a link between certain forms of assisted conception and an increased risk of birth defects. The paper, published in the NEJM, suggested that ICSI (intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection) correlated with defets in just about 10% of births. The base rate is about 5.8%, rising […]
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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.) […]
Onwards, to the past! Especially when slavery is involved…
Wow. Steve Fouch has, on the Christian Medical Fellowship’s blog, offered advice on how to vote in the BMA ballot on industrial action. Now, Fouch isn’t the same as the CMF, and I don’t suppose what he writes indicates the CMF’s position any more than what I write here represents the BMJ’s. Even so, what he suggests […]
The benefits of contraception?
The government in New Zealand is proposing to spend $1 million of funding for women on a benefit and their teenage daughters to get long-term reversible contraception – such as an implant. Advice on accessing this treatment and its implications will be provided by case workers in the Social Services. The NZ government seems almost […]
Book Review: Nie Jingbao, “Medical Ethics in China”
London: Routledge, 2011; 263 + xiii pp Guest Post by Yonghui Ma For those who have a particular interest in cross-cultural bioethics, Nie’s book, Medical Ethics in China, is an absolute feast. Luckily, I am one of them and it more than satisfied my appetite for the subject. It brings us much closer to a fascinating […]
Give the gift of giving – donate someone elses organ or how the current online system for organ donation allows you to sign up others as long as you know a few details about them. Oops.
Hattip to Nathan Emmerich for speculating about this on Facebook and then blogging about it here: Organ Donation: Why isn’t there an App for that? There are a number of ways you can volunteer to donate your organs when you die in the UK, you can sign up when you get a drivers license, you […]
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, […]
Bioethics – a discipline without a natural home?
This post is inspired by this excellent and challenging article by Carl Elliot where he asks why should students study bioethics at scandal plagued institutions such as his own University of Minnesota (I said it was challenging). One of the problem he notes is that bioethicists in scandal plagued departments such as medical schools rarely […]
X-rays, aslyum seekers and research ethics/governance
There is an interesting story here: in the Guardian about a research trial being carried out by the UK border agency using dental x-rays to try and identify the age of young asylum seekers. […]