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 […]
Category: JME
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 […]
The Challenge of Futile Treatment
Guest Post by Lindy Willmott and Ben White For decades, researchers from around the world have found evidence that doctors provide futile treatment to adult patients who are dying. Some discussion of this topic has turned on matters of definition (see our recent contribution to this debate), with a broader concept of “perceived inappropriate treatment” […]
Individualised and Personalised QALYs in Exceptional Treatment Decisions
Guest Post by Warwick Heale When NICE decides whether to make a treatment available on the NHS it considers both clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness. Cost effectiveness is based on population-level QALY data, as is appropriate for a population-level policy. However, this can cause problems for exceptional individual patients. When a doctor wants to offer an […]
IAB 2016: Graeme Didn’t Say “None”…
Every two years, I write a little post-mortem of the IAB conference, mentioning particular high and low points. But since I’ve heard near-blanket praise for this year’s Edinburgh fandango, there won’t be too many of the latter. And everyone with whom I’ve been in contact since has been highly impressed; we’re all still on a bit […]
Writers Whose Expertise is Deplorably Low
Something popped up on my twitter feed the other day: this document from Oxford’s philosophy department. (I’m not sure quite what it is. Brochure? In-house magazine? Dunno. It doesn’t really matter, though.) In it, there’s a striking passage from Jeff McMahan’s piece on practical ethics: Even though what is variously referred to as ‘practical ethics’ or […]
Special “Editor’s Choice” Issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics Now Online
by Brian D. Earp / (@briandavidearp) On behalf of the Journal of Medical Ethics, I am excited to announce the publication of a special “Editor’s Choice” issue, now online at the journal website. In a rare turn for the journal, the entire issue made up of “Editor’s Choice” papers, with invited (peer-reviewed) papers from both up-and-coming and established […]