Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
It’s hard not to brood from time to time on some of the intractable public health problems that entangle us. Take obesity. Swimming with my boys over the weekend, I was again struck by how much the food that should sustain us is killing us. It’s hard as well not to wonder where change might […]
We take it for granted that compassion is at the heart of good care. But what if the hand that reaches out to yours is a robot’s? What if the last face you see on earth is a facsimile? The use of robotics is well established in parts of medicine. Surgery involving remote manipulation of […]
For all the fanfare that headline science can generate, it is usually quiet science that arouses my sympathies. Carefully uncovered facts can settle like welcome oil, stilling the troubled waters of moral panic and vengeful politics. I am more drawn to the Victorian naturalists who posted songbirds to each other, carefully mapping variation, than to […]
Many years ago I was walking along Kilburn High Road with a sharp-eyed naturalist friend when he spotted an ear of domestic wheat growing in one of those squares of soil cut into the pavement for urban trees—forlorn scraps of earth that litter gets stuck in, cigarettes get put out in, and dogs (and the […]
I’ve been doing some work recently with a GP trainer. I’m not a good judge of these things, but I would put him in his mid-fifties. He strikes me as the sort of committed, diligent, unassuming doctor who has helped form the backbone of post War British primary care. Committed to the NHS, possessed of […]
I was at a conference on doctors and social media recently, sharing a platform with the GMC. The organisers put up some darkly funny tweets by doctors at the ends of their tethers, usually fired off in the small hours. There were jokes at the expense of patients and juniors, managers and colleagues…The question for […]
Medical ethics has positioned itself as a decision making tool, a philosophical spanner if you like in the clinician’s toolbox. For understandable reasons it has concentrated on practical dilemmas: even those landmark legal decisions—the removal of treatment from Anthony Bland comes to mind—are buttressed by intense philosophical scrutiny. In the process medical ethics has attracted […]
I doubt few areas of medical practice are more ethically charged than the forced treatment of people with mental disorders. Recently a colleague forwarded me some comments made in March this year by Juan Mendez, the special rapporteur on torture, regarding mental illness. (For anyone unfamiliar with the United Nations human rights structures, a special […]
During the years I have been talking to doctors about medical ethics, I have often heard it said that when push comes to shove, the rights dice are loaded in favour of patients. All this talk of patient autonomy is all very well but what about the autonomy of doctors? What about our rights? With […]
A gamesome piece by Garrison Keillor in this month’s Prospect on, dare I say it, the prospect of living to be 100 and what it might mean to him. It comes on the back of data from the Office for National Statistics suggesting that a third of babies born last year will live to be […]