Last spring, George Tiller was killed. (I was going to say murdered, or assassinated, but both of those are morally and legally weighted…) Tiller was one of a very small community of doctors in the US willing to give late-term abortions, and it was for this that he was shot. Scott Roeder is currently on […]
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A Very Small Post about Homeopathy
I know I keep stressing the distinction between ethics and activist – and how it’s usually just before I witter on about something vaguely activistic. However, I do think it’s worth popping over to look at the 10:23 Campaign, which takes a robust and sceptical attitude to homeopathy. If you’re not sure about why it’s […]
Sic transit gloria DECODE
You may remember an Icelandic company called DECODE that, way back in the last decade wanted to collect DNA samples from the complete Icelandic population, link them with health data and perform amazing gene-epidemiological studies that would revolutionise medicine. Many investors will certainly remember DECODE which, at its peak had a market value in the […]
Funeral Expenses? I’m Going to be Pickled!
Since we’re technically still in the holiday period, have a bit more silliness. This concerns a scheme that is a supposed to disincentivise drink-driving. A funeral home in Rome, Georgia, is offering… Oh, what the hell. I’ll let the local paper, the Rome News-Tribune, tell the story: Between now and noon on Thursday, drivers can […]
Chuck Norris on why Obamacare is Bad
You know Chuck Norris: martial-arts-film-star-bloke-turned-right-wing-commentator-and-walking-internet-meme. Yep. Him. Well, he’s identified exactly what’s wrong with Obamacare. It might mean publicly funded terminations of pregnancy. And imagine what state the world’d be in if the Virgin Mary had had an abortion. Go on. Imagine it. [A]s we near the eve of another Christmas, I wonder: What would have […]
Public Spending – and the NHS in Perspective.
I have a vague memory of John Lydon telling the crowd at the first Sex Pistols reunion gig in 1996 (Woo-hoo! I was there!) that he’d had a message of support from the owner of Creation records. “Don’t trust Alan McGee,” he snarled. “He’s a very clever man.” […]
More on Ethics Teaching
Further to the post below, and by complete serendipity – David and I have asked for pre-publication access to the JME, but haven’t got it yet – this month’s Journal is crammed with stuff on ethics in the undergrad medical curriculum. Sophie Mills gives a student’s-eye account of the place of ethics in the curriculum […]
The Good of Small Things
A few nights ago, I went out for a curry with a doctor friend who’s just returned from a year working in Africa. She was telling me all about the experience and about its difficulties. Some of these difficulties are straightforwardly down to poverty; others are down to mismanagement or – if not exactly mismanagement […]
Teaching Ethics in Medical Schools
My attention has wandered recently to this editorial in Clinical Medicine, concerning the place and content of ethics education in the undergraduate medical curriculum. There’s nothing Earth-shattering in there, but the piece does draw out a few persistent problems with teaching ethics within the medical degree: […]
Too Braney by Half?
One of my favourite blogs is spEak You’re bRanes, “dedicated to the dribble-spattered lunacy of BBC ‘Have Your Say’ discussions”. It’s splenetic, merciless and very, very funny in its dissections of the bigoted, ill-considered and illiterate bilge that gets posted under the guise of “discussion” on the BBC news website. To be fair, the Beeb has to […]