I only ask because of some of the stuff that’s been suggested in relation to the debates surrounding embryo research that’re currently going on in the UK parliament – of which this example has to be one of the best I’ve seen for a long time. WARNING: I suppose that I ought to add a warning that the link […]
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It’s oh-so Quiet…
As some of you may have heard, Wired magazine is suggesting that the age of the blog may already be over. And the level of activity here over the past couple of weeks may have lent credence to that supposition. Full service will be resumed soon – it just seems like Søren, David and I are […]
Death and palliation – thoughts on Purdy.
A letter in The Times today considers the duty of doctors to ease the dying process, in the light of the Debbie Purdy case. Dr MS Ali wonders why “people like Debbie Purdy and others have to fear that they will not get the necessary assistance from the medical profession to relieve their suffering […]
A fishy affair
Writing in his usual uncompromising style Ben Goldacre describes the latest carry-ons in the “trial” carried out in Durham by the Council on whether fish oils improve GCSE performance: You’ll remember the Durham fish oil “trial” story, possibly the greatest example of scientific incompetence ever documented from a local authority. Initially they said – to […]
The ethics of abortion – De ja vue or necessary debate?
This summer I realised with some horror that it was 20 years ago I first presented a paper at an international medical ethics conference while still being a medical student. That paper was on who should control the fate of aborted foetuses and the paper I gave the year after at the same conference was […]
Hot on the newsstands…
The latest JME is out today… and I’d just like to draw everyone’s attention to the paper on facial allograft transplantation by Ben White and some random bloke who needs a haircut. This isn’t because I had anything to do with it, but because (a) it’s very good, and (b) it’s based on Ben’s dissertation […]
On Hospital Ethicists
At the beginning of August, Dan Sokol wrote a piece for the BBC news site in which he touched on the place of hospital-employed ethicists. Apparently, this is a reasonably common position in the States. I used to be of the opinion that hospital ethicists would be a good idea – when I was a student, […]
The Boundaries of Sanity
One of the topics to which I return every so often is ethics in psychiatry – particularly in the context of problems concerning how we decide whether someone is sane or insane. Julian Baggini ponders related topics here. Worth a few minutes, I think… […]
WoooOOOoooO!! Research!!
That “wooOOOooO” was the sound a ghost makes, just in case you were wondering. I’m not sure if what follows is more of a tale about woeful reporting, or woeful research. What I am more sure about is that many of you will have seen BBC reporting that “[a] large study is to examine near-death experiences in […]
The good old but somewhat cold days
Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber links to this 1958 piece of research on how children behaved when locked inside fridges… Using a specially designed enclosure, 201 children 2 to 5 years of age took part in tests in which six devices were used, including two developed in the course of this experiment as the result […]