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 […]
Category: Law
Autism, Mental Illness, Euthanasia and the WaPo
There was a piece in the Washington Post the other day with a striking headline: Where the Prescription for Autism can be Death. Normally, if we’re saying that the prescription for x is y, we mean to say that y is being suggested as a treatment for x. Painkillers are the prescription for a bad back, a steroid cream the prescription […]
Homeopathy, Blacklisting, and the Misuse of Choice
It seems that homeopathy might at last be facing some serious opposition from within the NHS, with the prospect of its being blacklisted being considered. There’s any number of people who’ll be entirely on board with that. Homeopathy doesn’t work. Of course, a lot of medicines turn out not to work, or not to work […]
Stop What You’re Doing: This is Important.
I’d not realised it, but the latest iteration of the erstwhile Medical Innovation Bill – colloquially known as the Saatchi Bill – is up for debate in the Commons on Friday. This is it in its latest form: to all intents and purposes, though, it’s the same thing about which I’ve blogged before. In a […]
Assisted Dying’s Conscience Claws
Aaaaaaaand so the latest attempt to get assisted dying of some sort onto the statute books in the UK has bitten the dust. I can’t say I’m surprised. Watching the debate in the Commons – I didn’t watch it all, but I did watch a fair chunk of it – it was striking just how […]
Making the Jump to a Medico-Legal Career
Guest Post by Daniel Sokol On a number of occasions, I have been asked by early career ethicists about the move from ethics to law, or the wisdom of seeking a legal qualification to supplement their ethical knowledge. In the UK, this can be achieved remarkably quickly. This blog post is an answer to those […]
The Legal and Moral Significance of Implantation
Guest post by Sally Sheldon We tend to talk about contraception and abortion as if they were two separate and readily distinguishable practices, the former preventing pregnancy and the latter ending it. This understanding has a very important effect in current British law, where a relatively permissive approach to the availability of contraception stands in […]
What should Investigators be Doing with Unexpected Findings in Brain Imaging Research?
Guest Post by Caitlin Cole Incidental findings in brain imaging research are common. Investigators can discover these unexpected findings of potential medical significance in up to 70% of their research scans. However, there are no standards to guide investigators as to whether they should actively search for these findings or which, if any, they should […]
Animal Liberation: Sacrificing the Good on the Altar of the Perfect?
For my money, one of the best papers at the nonhuman animal ethics conference at Birmingham a couple of weeks ago was Steve Cooke’s.* He was looking at the justifications for direct action in the name of disrupting research on animals, and presented the case – reasonably convincingly – that the main arguments against the permissibility of […]
The Death of Sidaway: Values, Judgments and Informed Consent
Guest post by Kirsty Keywood (University of Manchester) On 11th March Nadine Montgomery won her case before the UK Supreme Court to gain compensation for the failure of her obstetrician to warn her of risks associated with the vaginal delivery of a large infant – a risk which she would have averted by requesting a […]