A curious letter was sent out by the Department of Health the other day to GPs and the Chief Executives of various health authorities, trusts, and so on. The full text is available online, but here’s the nub of it: ACCESS TO HEALTH SERVICES FOR MILITARY VETERANS – PRIORITY TREATMENT The purpose of this letter […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
Questions, questions…
In response to the post below about circumcision, “IntactByDefault” asked a number of questions. I think that they merit a thread of their own, although I’ve touched on some of the issues before. Is it not the case that, short of legislation, the role of bioethicists is to put a check on the potentially unethical […]
Public Spending – and the NHS in Perspective.
I have a vague memory of John Lydon telling the crowd at the first Sex Pistols reunion gig in 1996 (Woo-hoo! I was there!) that he’d had a message of support from the owner of Creation records. “Don’t trust Alan McGee,” he snarled. “He’s a very clever man.” […]
The Good of Small Things
A few nights ago, I went out for a curry with a doctor friend who’s just returned from a year working in Africa. She was telling me all about the experience and about its difficulties. Some of these difficulties are straightforwardly down to poverty; others are down to mismanagement or – if not exactly mismanagement […]
Too Braney by Half?
One of my favourite blogs is spEak You’re bRanes, “dedicated to the dribble-spattered lunacy of BBC ‘Have Your Say’ discussions”. It’s splenetic, merciless and very, very funny in its dissections of the bigoted, ill-considered and illiterate bilge that gets posted under the guise of “discussion” on the BBC news website. To be fair, the Beeb has to […]
Libel Reform (again)
Further to Søren’s post just below here, it’s worth noting that the site to which he links hosts not only a petition, but also a facility whereby it’ll check who your MP is, and provide a pro-forma letter that you can edit and then email to him or her from the site. I filled that in […]
If Bioethics doesn’t exist, what am I doing here?
OK – I admit it: some rhetorical questions are too easily answered. Still, I’ve been reading Leigh Turner’s paper in the latest JME, and mulling it over. The title of the paper – “Does Bioethics Exist?” is a bit more radical than the content, wich considers the question of whether bioethics exists as a “widely […]
Nursing by Degree
A couple of weeks ago, the government announced that, from 2013, all nursing staff would have to be graduates. “Degree-level education,” said Health Minister for England Ann Keen, will provide new nurses with the decision-making skills they need to make high-level judgements in the transformed NHS. I’m not so sure of this. […]
Does Medicine – and Medical Ethics – have a Pro-Life Bias?
There’s an essay by Diego Gracia called “Palliative Care and the Historical Background” that I frequently use in classes about Care ethics, and there’s a passage in it that always gets a fascinating reaction from students. In this passage, Gracia claims that the true goal of medicine has always been curing, rather than taking care of […]
When the Witch Asks a Question, I Can’t Resist
In the replies to this thread, The Witch Doctor asks this: A Scenario: Apparently there are some sites on the web just now claiming that the world is going to end in 2012. Some teenagers are becoming agitated. I don’t want to be around when the world ends, so I’m going to drink some poison […]