Guest Post by Nir Eyal Re: Special Issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics on the ethics and challenges of an HIV cure For most patients with HIV who have access to antiretroviral treatment and use it properly, that treatment works well. But the holy grail of HIV research remains finding a cure. Sometimes that […]
Category: Guest Post
Harm: Could It Sometimes Be a Good Thing?
Guest Post: Patrick Sullivan Response: Hanna Pickard and Steve Pearce, Balancing costs and benefits: a clinical perspective does not support a harm minimization approach for self-injury outside of community settings BBC news recently reported on the approval of plans for facilities to support self-injection rooms to allow drug users to inject safely under supervision in Glasgow. […]
Balancing Costs and Benefits: A Clinical Perspective Does not Support a Harm Minimization Approach for Self-injury Outside of Community Settings
Guest Post: Hanna Pickard and Steve Pearce Responding to: Harm may sometimes be a good thing? Patrick Sullivan Sullivan’s emphasis on the importance of supporting autonomy and independence among vulnerable people who self-injure is fundamental to good clinical practice. This is why some forms of harm minimization, such as encouraging reflection, responsibility, safe cutting and where appropriate […]
Combating Doping in Sports: More of the Same or What?
Guest Post: Bengt Kayser and Jan Tolleneer Paper: Ethics of a relaxed antidoping rule accompanied by harm-reduction measures Doping in sports continues to be prominently present in the media. Regularly ’scandals’ surface that then trigger flurries of articles, documentaries and reactions in the media. The general tone is one of moral opprobrium, dopers are considered deviant […]
The Importance of Disambiguating Questions about Consent and Refusal
Guest Post: Rob Lawlor Re: Cake or death? Ending confusions about asymmetries between consent and refusal Imagine you have an adolescent patient who is in need of life saving treatment. You offer him the treatment, assuming that he would consent, but he refuses. As he is not yet a competent adult, you decide to treat […]
HIV Cure Research and The Dual Aims of the Informed Consent Process
Guest Post: Danielle Bromwich and Joseph Millum Paper: Informed Consent to HIV Research Special Issue: The benefit/risk ratio challenge in clinical research, and the case of HIV cure A cure for HIV would be tremendously valuable. Approximately 37 million people worldwide are HIV-positive and 15 million are currently on antiretroviral therapy. Until recently it was assumed […]
Politicians, Delusional Managers and the Future of the NHS: Have NHS Leaders Failed to “Speak Truth unto Power”?
Guest Post by David Lock QC [NB: This is a slightly longer version of a post that appeared on the BMJ blog earlier today.] Politicians, delusional managers and the future of the NHS: have NHS leaders failed to “speak truth unto power”? This blog is not a rant – well not too much of a […]
Who is Afraid of the Big BroadBioethics? A Dialogue Between Authors of “Highlights in Bioethics Through 40 Years”
Guest Post: Pingyue Jin and Mark Hakkarinen Article: Highlights in bioethics through 40 years: a quantitative analysis of top-cited journal articles Dear readers of the JME’s blog, we hope this short dialogue below may prompt your interest to join us in this journey that explores the depth and width of the field of bioethics. Everything starts […]
Mind the Gap: Ethical Failures in the Treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Guest Post: Charlotte Blease & Keith Geraghty Article: Epistemic injustice in healthcare encounters: Evidence from chronic fatigue syndrome by Blease, Carel, & Geraghty Some illnesses are uncool. That might sound like an inflammatory comment – especially for a medical journal, yet perhaps the biggest concealed fact in medicine is that hierarchies of diseases exist among […]
The Moral Agency of Institutions: Effectively Using Expert Nurses to Support Patient Autonomy
Guest Post: Sonya Charles Article: The Moral Agency of Institutions: Effectively Using Nurses to Support Patient Autonomy When you think of nurses, what do you think of? Florence Nightingale? Nurse Ratchet? A sassy, but competent woman in scrubs? Popular culture has not always been kind to nurses and, even when it has, it rarely gives […]