Julian Sheather is specialist adviser (ethics and human rights), policy directorate, BMA.
Am I alone in feeling that faint thrill in the air, the thrill that comes in the interregnum between the expectation of pain and its arrival? There’ s probably a word for it, something Germanic and angular, compounded from the lexica of psychopathology. […]
Asked his opinion on the political issues of the day, Saul Bellow, the American novelist, would sometimes say that he was in favour of all the good things and opposed to all the bad ones. Bellow’s lovely little quip has been on my mind a good deal of late. […]
I am a terrible coward. I flee pain as the gazelle flees the lion. On a bad day I am living proof of Jeremy Bentham’s universal dictum: that the sole motive of a human being is to avoid pain and achieve pleasure. For this reason alone I am a champion of medicine. If I am […]
Barbara Harris is a concerned American. After adopting four children from a crack-addicted mother, she tried to change the law in California. She wanted to make it mandatory for every mother giving birth to a drug-addicted child to use long term birth control. When the Bill failed Barbara Harris set up the charity ‘Project Prevention’. […]
I have just been to a lecture – whose title I’ve stolen for this blog – given by Inez de Beaufort, Professor of Healthcare Ethics at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. Subtitled ‘Ethics, obesity and public health’, and organised by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. […]
I was at the Liverpool Medical Institution recently, judging a debating competition between medical students from Manchester and Liverpool. […]
I know not whether to laugh or cry. Into my inbox has just popped an index prohibitorum, a list of words drawn up by the Local Government Association that must not be used when providing information to the public. As a word-haunted liberal I am immediately – and quite properly for a liberal – in […]
Earlier this week, the fairly formidable Commons Science and Technology Committee published its report on homeopathy. For anyone who likes a bit of evidence with their medicine, the results were some distance from surprising. The NHS, it concluded, should stop funding homoeopathy. In addition the Medicines and Health Care products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should not […]
I have an old friend with a long and complicated relationship with food. Several years ago she answered an ad in a woman’s magazine. She filled out a questionnaire, sent off a sizeable chunk of cash, and received back, on the basis of no discernible evidence whatsoever, a list of her likely food intolerances. Overnight […]
I have just been ill. Not very ill. Not ‘under the doctor’. Just a lingering cold, a touch of manflu. In the end I took a day off. I woke in the morning from an uneasy sleep and thought no, not today, today I’ll struggle no more. My wife took the children to school and […]