Guest post by Alka Chandna How many animals are experimented on in laboratories? It’s a simple question, the answer to which provides a basic parameter to help us wrap our heads around the increasingly controversial and ethically harrowing practice of locking animals in cages and conducting harmful procedures on them that are often scary, painful, and […]
Category: Resource
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 […]
Autonomy and the Circumcision Wars
Guest Post by Akim McMath In December of last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its proposed new recommendations on male circumcision. The verdict? Circumcision provides major benefits with minimal risks. These benefits accrue whether circumcision is performed in infancy or later on in life. Circumcision may even help to stem the […]
Physicians and Euthanasia: What about Psychiatric Illness, Dementia and Weltschmerz?
Guest Post by Eva Bolt In the Netherlands, requests for euthanasia are not uncommon. A physician who grants a request for euthanasia in the Netherlands is not prosecuted if the criteria for due care (described in the Euthanasia Act) are met. An example of one of these criteria is the presence of unbearable suffering without […]
Saatchi Bill – Update
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. It turns out that the version of the Medical Innovation Bill about which I wrote this morning isn’t the most recent: the most recent version is available here. Naïvely, I’d assumed that the government would make sure the latest version was the easiest to find. Silly me. Here’s the updated version […]
Adrenaline, Information Provision and the Benefits of a Non-Randomised Methodology
Guest Post by Ruth Stirton and Lindsay Stirton, University of Sheffield One of us – Ruth – was on Newsnight on Wednesday the 13th August talking about the PARAMEDIC2 trial. The trial is a double blind, individually randomised, placebo controlled trial of adrenaline v. normal saline injections in cardiac arrest patients treated outside hospital. In simpler terms, if […]
Their Poor Little Heads might Explode
There’s a nice little piece by Martin Robbins in this week’s Guardian in which he talks about the fact that women seem to be less supportive of abortion than men. That does seem counterintuitive, given that… well, given the obvious physiological facts and the relative burden of risks related to pregnancy. So there’s an interesting little anthropological […]
Medical Information for Sale?
Reader Keith emailed me a week or so ago to tip me off about the government’s plans to allow private firms to access medical information. It’s a story that has subsequently been picked up by – inter alia – The Guardian. As with the last post I made here, I’m going to have to cry off from saying […]
How Magic can help Teach Students about Medical Ethics
Guest post by Daniel Sokol, KCL For some time, I have been interested in the relationship between magic and medical ethics. Five years ago, I gave a talk in Prague on how to use magic in medical ethics education. More recently, I held a workshop on Magic for Anaesthetists, which touched on ethical issues in […]
Drug Legalisation in Uruguay: Opening up Pandora’s Box
Guest post by Melissa Bone, University of Manchester Uruguay is poised to become the first country in the world to legalise and regulate the sale of cannabis for recreational use. On the 31st July 2013 a draft bill legalising cannabis was passed by members of Uruguay’s lower house of congress, where 50 out of a […]