Following on from yesterday’s vaguely pro-paternalism post, my eye was drawn to this story, concerning a prisoner who has won the right (or, rather, had the right confirmed) to have high-energy foods sent to him while he’s in chokey. The beeb has a few crowd-pleasing splutters about the crime for which he was imprisoned, but […]
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Legislating for Wisdom
The decision of legislators in Northern Ireland to vote in favour of a bill requiring cyclists to wear helmets has apparently been met warmly by medics. It would appear that some people have raised a worry that requiring such behaviour might lead to an overall drop in health, on the grounds that people will be […]
Spanish Medical Law Blog
José Fernándes has drawn my attention to this blog, Medicina y Derecho (Medicine and Law) which may be of interest to Spanish-speaking readers. My own grasp of the language is (alas) too poor to allow me to say anything about the blog’s interests, or what’s going on there; maybe someone could give a quick assessment in the […]
Scientific Publicity and the Dilemmas of Publication (part II)
Following on from the post ↓down there↓ about the publication of potentially dangerous results, and as if by magic, into my inbox comes a cfp from the journal Medicine Studies for a special edition about responsibility in biomedical practices. Details are below the fold. […]
Scientific Publicity and the Dilemmas of Publication
There’s a short interview with David Nichols in last week’s New Scientist in which he talks about his place in the history of the production of “legal highs”. The backstory is that he was doing work on MDMA (ecstasy) with half an eye on using it in the treatment of psychiatric and neurological conditions. […]
NHS Treatment and Failed Asylum-Seekers
A medical student from Newcastle writes: I am currently writing an ethics assignment relating to a paediatric placement I undertook earlier this academic year. During the placement I was involved in the care of 11-month old twins from Khartoum, Sudan, whose parents had brought them into hospital because they were suffering from recurrent generalised tonic-clonic […]
Live-Donor Transplants: A Real Prisoner’s Dilemma
You may have seen in the news recently the story of Jamie and Gladys Scott, two sisters in Mississippi serving a life prison sentence for armed robbery. Jamie requires dialysis, and has been offered parole on medical grounds; Gladys has been granted parole on condition that she agree to donate a kidney to her sister. (The […]
Book Review: Norman Cantor, “After We Die”
Washington DC: Georgetown UP, 2010; 372+x pp “Here’s the story; it starts at the end,” says the dead narrator at the beginning of Ali Smith’s novel Hotel World. It’s a bit of a cliche to say that the dead have stories to tell, but they do have stories to be told about them. Among them […]
Hate the Sin, Operate on the Sinner
There’s a story in the BMJ about a German surgeon who refused to operate on an anaesthetised patient because he – the patient – had a swastika tattoo. The surgeon, it’s reported, was a Jew who couldn’t find it in his conscience to operate on anyone with Nazi sympathies. The head of the German Medical […]
Two Fathers… and an Inflated Role for Genes?
This is interesting: researchers in Texas are reporting that they’ve generated viable mice with two genetic fathers. The science makes my head hurt, but PZ Myers gives a decent précis (although it’s still a bit long to reproduce here, and I’m not going to attempt even to give a précis of the précis). The technology […]