Guest Post by Phoebe Friesen Re: Personal responsibility within health policy: unethical and ineffective If someone who has smoked two packs a day for thirty years and someone who has never smoked but is unfortunate enough to inherit a genetic condition are both in need of heart surgery, who should be given priority? Should an […]
Category: Guest Post
Our Special Treatment of Patients in a Vegetative State is a Form of Cruel and Unusual Punishment
by Professor Dominic Wilkinson, @Neonatalethics Professor of Medical Ethics, Consultant Neonatologist Our society has good reason to provide special treatment to people with severe brain injuries and their families. But our current “special treatment” for a group of the most severely affected people with brain injuries leads to devastating, agonising, protracted and totally preventable suffering. […]
Should Junior Doctors Still Strike?
Guest Post by Adam James Roberts In early July, the British Medical Association’s junior members voted by a 16-point margin to reject a new employment contract negotiated between the BMA’s leadership and the Government. The chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, Johann Malawana, stood down following the result, noting the “considerable anger and mistrust” […]
Is it Ethical to Pay Adolescents to Take HIV Treatment?
Guest Post by Rebecca Hope, Nir Eyal, Justin Healy & Jacqueline Bhabha Re: Paying for antiretroviral adherence: is it unethical when the patient is an adolescent? With treatment, a child with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa can expect to live a healthy life. Better access to HIV treatment is contributing to a global decline in HIV deaths […]
Letter from Iraq: Ethical Dilemmas in an Iraqi Burn Centre
Guest Post by Mustafa AL-Shamsi Health requires a multidisciplinary approach. In the absence of proper support, facilities and literate people, there is little that a physician can do to cure his patient regardless his proficiency. The following is not a story; it comes from what I experienced when I was an intern at the burn […]
Sharing Motherhood and Patriarchal Prejudices
Guest Post by Ezio Di Nucci, University of Copenhagen Re: IVF, Same Sex Couples and the Value of Biological Ties Reproductive technologies are increasingly enabling access to parenthood to people who previously could not procreate: these developments are changing concepts and practices within family relationships in interesting ways. Take the following example: in a particular form […]
Making Humans Morally Better Won’t Fix the Problems of Climate Change
Guest Post by Bob Simpson, Monash University Re: Climate change, cooperation and moral bioenhancement The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly said that greenhouse gas emissions increase the likelihood of severe and irreversible harm for people and ecosystems. And in his State of the Union address in 2015, Barack Obama emphasised these problems, saying that climate change […]
What is a Moral Epigenetic Responsibility?
Guest Post by Charles Dupras & Vardit Ravitsky Re: The ambiguous nature of epigenetic responsibility Epigenetics is a recent yet promising field of scientific research. It explores the influence of the biochemical environment (food, toxic pollutants) and the social environment (stress, child abuse, socio-economic status) on the expression of genes, i.e. on whether and how they […]
Are Doctors Who Know the Law More Likely to Follow it?
Guest Post by Ben White and Lindy Willmott, Australian Centre for Health Law Research This was the question we considered in a recent JME article about the role of law in decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment from adults who lack capacity. The short answer is ‘yes’. The longer answer is also ‘yes’ – although […]
An Accidental Expert
Guest Post by Derick Wade Re: Back to the Beside: Making Clinical Decisions in Patients with Prolongued Unconsciousness In 1994, not long after the Bland judgement, I was telephoned one day by the office of the Official Solicitor. “Was I familiar with the vegetative state, and if so would I be prepared to see two people for […]