In New York state last week legislators passed an extraordinary bill that, effectively, indicts the practice of New York doctors. That the bill was thought necessary, and, even more so, that it was opposed by the Medical Society of New York is a sad reflection of medical practice in that part of the world.
In a paper released today in the Journal of Medical Ethics, a large survey of UK doctors found that doctors’ religion influenced their views and practice of end-of-life care. Why does this matter? A number of headlines highlighted that atheist or agnostic doctors were more likely to report having participated in “ethically contentious end-of life actions”: ie taking part in terminal sedation or in actions that they expected or partly intended would hasten the patient’s death. But other headlines emphasised the obvious flip-side: doctors who identified themselves as ‘very religious’ or ‘extremely religious’ were about 35% less likely than non-religious doctors to report having taken this sort of step.
Read More »Should doctors come clean? Religion makes a difference to end-of-life decisions
Written by Roman Gaehwiler
Reconstructive plastic surgery to correct ravages of disease and injuries as well as gross physical abnormalities constitutes a core medical practice. Reconstructive procedures, however, lie along a continuum, without any clear boundary between therapeutic reconstructive surgery for diagnosable problem and purely cosmetic surgery.[1]
Read More »Cosmetic Surgery – What is the Matter with Dr Salesman?
by Rebecca Roache
The Brazilian
model Gisele Bundchen recently—and controversially—claimed that mothers should
be required by law to breastfeed their babies for the first six months of their
lives.
A few days later, she partially retracted the claim on her blog, insisting that her talk of a breastfeeding law should
not be taken literally. It was simply a way of expressing her belief in the
importance of doing the best for her child.
After all, legally enforcing breastfeeding would be madness, right?
Not
according to the Indonesian government.
It recently passed a law giving babies the right to six months of
exclusive breastfeeding,
except in cases where medical problems prevent their mothers from breastfeeding. Mothers who do not comply face a year in
prison or a fine of 100,000,000 Rupiahs (around £7,100), and those who prevent
mothers from fulfilling their breastfeeding obligations also face punishments. Scientists and health professionals generally
agree that breastfeeding is healthier for babies than the alternatives (see,
for example, here),
that not enough mothers do it (see here),
and governments around the world invest huge sums trying to get mothers to
breastfeed. But is criminalising non-breastfeeding mothers a good idea?
Is drug addiction a disease? Substance Dependence appears as a diagnosis in the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM-IV). There are medical specialists in the field who use a range of different drug and non-drug treatments for patients who are addicted. There are hospitals and clinics where those who are addicted can seek help. But if it is a disease why is it treated as a crime? After all we do not lock people up because they have cancer, or hepatitis, or heart disease.
Antibiotics are overprescribed. That is, they are given out in many cases where they will achieve little or nothing for the patient. On its own, this would merely be wasteful, but usage of antibiotics increases the development of antibiotic resistant organisms and this is bad for everyone. Today's Guardian has an article suggesting that antibiotic resistance could become a *very* big problem, with all major antibiotics becoming ineffective within a couple of generations (see also the original research in the Lancet). This leads to some very interesting questions concerning the ethics of prescribing antibiotics.
Introduction
In a recently broadcasted documentation about gene-doping, multiple award winning Swiss science journalist and author, Beat Glogger, reflected the issue of gene-doping in a sensitive and objective manner. In this Swiss-German co-production Andy Miah, a bold British Bioethicist, argued that gene-doping is supposed to be a natural friendly method of performance enhancement, whereas many other practices in the past weren’t. Simultaneously, he considered athletes no more as natural creatures by arguing: “We have to get rid of the imagination, that athletes are natural human-beings” (freely re-translated from the German version). Despite the fact that this statement is rather an anti-thesis than a substantiation for his strident position, I have to admit that the current development in gene technology tends to construct a sort of athletic hybrid. No doubt, this is a serious future issue we have to face. Nevertheless, Andy Miah’s declaration implies that athletes might kind take on a pioneer role regarding the subject of genetic enhancement. Therefore, is that an issue worth considering or even to achieving?
Yesterday Richard Ashcroft, Professor of Bioethics at Queen Mary College, London, wrote in a Facebook update: ‘I am fed up with being asked to come into science/medicine projects, add a bit of ethics fairy dust, usually without getting any share of the pie, just to shut reviewers up. I am not doing it any more. If they think we are important, treat us with respect. Otherwise, get lost.’
Lots of people liked this. So do I. Ethicists have for too long been the invisible but essential backroom boys and girls of biomedicine; patronised by the practitioners of ‘hard’ science; seen as unimaginative but powerful bureaucrats who have to be kept sweet; as despised social scientists who wield rubber stamps made essential by other zeitgeist-dictating social scientists who want to keep their woolly-headed chums in a job; as factotums who don’t deserve to have their names on the papers any more than the temp who does the photocopying. Why is this?
Read More »Ethicists unite: you have nothing to lose but your non-citation
by Rebecca Roache
Human
enhancement is a hot topic in bioethics.
Typically conceived as the use of technology to raise human capacities
above what is merely healthy or normal, it attracts questions such as, Is it
ethical? Is it desirable? Is it cheating? and, Should the state
subsidise it? A common view is that,
whilst therapy—which aims to restore human capacities to what is healthy or
normal, but not to raise them above this level—is desirable; enhancement is at
best unnecessary [1], and at worst unethical [2]. Human enhancement, one might be tempted to
think, is for oddballs only: the average person is content merely to be
healthy.
Read More »Why public health campaigns should not promote enhancement
The Eighteenth International AIDS Conference is currently underway in Vienna, and one of the issues that has been under discussion is how to reduce HIV transmission within the various at-risk groups. One such group is the prison population, among whom HIV transmission occurs due to both illicit sexual activity and intravenous drug abuse. But prison authorities have often resisted putting in place public health measures such as condom or needle distribution that have been shown to be effective, because they regard sexual activity and drug use as prohibited in their prisons, and do not want to to be seen as condoning these activities. Is this concern a reasonable one?
