Okay – since everyone else on teh t’interwebz seems to be blogging about Watchmen, I thought I might join in. Especially because, if I don’t, David will: I think he’s more of a geek than I. (Most people are.) So, yeah. Long, violent, extraordinarily faithful to the book except for the improved dénouement, I’d’ve shot […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
Quick and pointless
This has been bugging me for months, if not years. Sorry to spam it here, but maybe someone could provide me with an answer: if and when an effective treatment is discovered for c. difficile, will it have to be renamed – perhaps as c. facile? Have I missed something? Like I said – sorry. […]
Homeopathy: Healing the World (in very very very small doses)
PZ Meyers has picked up a strange story: apparently, there’s an organisation called Homeopaths Without Borders – clearly picking up on MSF’s name – that intends to send crack teams of homeopaths to disaster areas. Their site’s mainly in German at the moment – they promise updates – but here’s a taste of what they […]
MP Not at all Dyslexic
Graham Stringer, the Labour MP for Blackley, has dismissed dyslexia as a myth invented to cover up for poor teaching. His claim brings to mind a claim reported a few years ago along the same lines made by Durham’s Julian Elliott. I’m not sure if it’s just a matter of the way in which the […]
A Bad Day to Detox… and a Diversion to Mill
Sense about Science are truly wonderful people, but, I fear, are engaged in a somewhat futile attempt to rid the world of gobbledygook. Nevertheless, with Stakhanovite determination, they’re putting the boot into the detox industry. Again. On a similar theme, Ben Goldacre showed his mettle on Today and elsewhere. I wish them luck, but I […]
Ethics Publishing Ethics
I’ve been thinking recently about what’s going on when one’s engaged in a piece of ethical writing, and what counts as a proper parameter for it. Particularly, I’ve been wondering whether there’s any obligation to be consistent between papers – is there any need for the papers that one publishes to be compatible at all? […]
Health care as a testing ground for theories of distributive justice
Political philosophy has historically been a surprisingly unreal subject and distributive justice as a sub-field has fared no better, indeed some of the primary discussions have focused on the distribution of plover eggs and claret and taken place on desert islands. There is some sense to this, abstracting away from society and normal circumstances can […]
What Can Doctors Do?
An area of research with which I’ve been toying for quite a long time now is to try to provide an answer to the question “What are doctors for?”. (Admittedly, the possibility of a cheap’n’nasty Heidegger pun in the title, Wozu Doktor?, has a reasonably high place in the list of the project’s attractions… Ho-hum. It’s […]
Death and palliation – thoughts on Purdy.
A letter in The Times today considers the duty of doctors to ease the dying process, in the light of the Debbie Purdy case. Dr MS Ali wonders why “people like Debbie Purdy and others have to fear that they will not get the necessary assistance from the medical profession to relieve their suffering […]
On Hospital Ethicists
At the beginning of August, Dan Sokol wrote a piece for the BBC news site in which he touched on the place of hospital-employed ethicists. Apparently, this is a reasonably common position in the States. I used to be of the opinion that hospital ethicists would be a good idea – when I was a student, […]