Guest Post by Hazem Zohny Some bodily and mental states are advantageous: a strong immune system, a sharp mind, strength. These are advantageous precisely because, in most contexts, they are likely to increase your chances of leading a good life. In contrast, disadvantageous states – e.g. the loss of a limb, a sense, or the […]
Category: JME
Healthcare Ethics Consultants’ Place in the World of Health Care ‘Professionals’
Guest Post by Abraham Schwab During a recent meeting at a local hospital, I was asked what role a good Healthcare Ethics Consultant should play. I gave a more ambiguous answer than I would like. I pointed out that Healthcare Ethics Consultants can help patients, providers, and administrators come to a common understanding of the values […]
China’s Terrible Transplant Secret
Guest Post by Wendy Rogers Earlier this year, a Malaysian politician, Datuk Bung Moktar Radin, travelled to China to receive a kidney transplant. The details are scanty. There is no mention of the source of the kidney that the Malaysian MP received. Reports of foreigners travelling to China for transplants rarely make the media, yet […]
Special Obligations: What Can Physicians Learn from Parenting?
Guest post by Jon Tilburt and Baruch Brody Editor’s note: this post introduces a recent paper by the authors now in press at the Journal of Medical Ethics: “Doubly distributing special obligations: what professional practice can learn from parenting“ Gaps between our ideals and our behavior are common. Sometimes what we say we believe and what we actually practice […]
Where to Publish and Not to Publish in Bioethics
Guest Post by Stefan Eriksson & Gert Helgesson, Uppsala University * Note: this is a cross-posting from The Ethics Blog, hosted by the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB) at Uppsala University. The link to the original article is here. Re-posted with permission of the authors. Introduction Allegedly, there are over 8,000 so-called predatory […]
Patient Views about Consent, Confidentiality & Information-Sharing in Genetic Medicine.
Guest post by Sandi Dheensa, Angela Fenwick and Anneke Lucassen Imagine you’re a clinician in genetic medicine. For a while, you’ve been seeing Joe Bloggs, a patient with a mutation in a gene that’s caused a hereditary form of colon cancer. As is your standard practice, you help Joe identify who in his family is also […]
No to Conscientious Objection Accommodation in Health Care
Guest post by Udo Schuklenk Canada is currently in the midst of a national debate about the scope of assisted dying regulations and policies. It’s a result of a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that declared parts of the country’s Criminal Code null and void that criminalises assisted dying. As you would expect, there is a […]
How We Feel about Human Cloning
Guest post by Joshua May Suppose you desperately want a healthy child to build a family of your own. As is increasingly common, however, you can’t do it naturally – whether from infertility, a genetic disease you don’t want to pass on, or a non-traditional relationship. If you seek a genetic connection with the child, […]
Nurses Cannot be Good Catholics
Guest Post by John Olusegun Adenitire It seems that if you are a nurse you cannot be a good Catholic. Or, better: if you want to work as a nurse then you might have to give up some of your religious beliefs. A relatively recent decision of the UK Supreme Court, the highest court in the […]
The Curious Case of Informed Consent for Egg Donation
Guest Post by Alana Rose Cattapan As Michael Dunn writes in a recent editorial for the JME, “no medical ethicist worth their salt would deny that consent is a foundational concept in contemporary medical ethics,” and it is an extraordinary understatement to say that much ink has been spilled on the topic. The spaces between […]