Nature of Suffering, Anarchy, Life and Liberty: Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease?
(Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - June 21, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Should older people ever be discharged from hospital at night?
AbstractThe discharge of older people from hospital at night is a topical and emotive issue that has recently gained media attention in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, including calls to prevent it occurring. With growing pressures on hospital capacity and ageing populations, normative aspects of hospital discharge are increasingly relevant. This paper therefore addresses the question: Should older people (say, over eighty years old) ever be discharged home from hospital during the night? Or given safety concerns, should regulation against the night-time discharge of older people be put in place? Employing a principlis...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - June 17, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Why Intellectual Disability is Not Mere Difference
This article argues that Barnes’s Value Neutral Model does not extend to intellectual disability. Intellectual disability is (1) intrinsically bad—by itself it makes a person worse off, apart from a non-accommodating environment; (2 ) universally bad—it lowers quality of life for every intellectually disabled person; and (3) globally bad—it reduces a person’s overall well-being. While people with intellectual disabilities are functionally disadvantaged, this does not imply that they are morally inferior—lower quality of life does not mean lesser moral status. No clinical implications concerning disability-based...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - June 9, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Suicide Risk Assessments: A Scientific and Ethical Critique
AbstractThere are widely held premises that suicide is almost exclusively the result of mental illness and there is “strong evidence for successfully detecting and managing suicidality in healthcare ” (Hogan and Grumet,2016). In this context, ‘zero-suicide’ policies have emerged, andsuicide risk assessment tools have become a normative component of psychiatric practice. This essay discusses how suicide evolved from a moral to a medical problem and how, in an effort to reduce suicide, a paternalistic healthcare response emerged to predict those at high risk. The evidence for the premises is critiqued and shown to be...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - May 23, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Treating Workers as Essential Too: An Ethical Framework for Public Health Interventions to Prevent and Control COVID-19 Infections among Meat-processing Facility Workers and Their Communities in the United States
AbstractMeat is a multi-billion-dollar industry that relies on people performing risky physical work inside meat-processing facilities over long shifts in close proximity. These workers are socially disempowered, and many are members of groups beset by historic and ongoing structural discrimination. The combination of working conditions and worker characteristics facilitate the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Workers have been expected to put their health and lives at risk during the pandemic because of government and industry pressures to keep this “essential industry” producing. Numerous interve...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - May 6, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Relationship Between Emotional Intelligence and Ethical Sensitivity in Turkish Nursing Students
This study aimed to investigate the relationship between nursing students ’ emotional intelligence and ethical sensitivity levels. The research employed a descriptive-correlational design, 201 nursing students studying at a university in the Central Anatolia region, Turkey, participated in the study. Students’ ethical sensitivity was found to be significant. The nursi ng students received the highest score in the “Interpersonal Orientation” sub-dimension of the Moral Sensitivity Scale, while their lowest score was observed in the “Experiencing ethical dilemma” sub-dimension. The SSREIT and MMSQSN total scores o...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - May 6, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Walking a Fine Germline: Synthesizing Public Opinion and Legal Precedent to Develop Policy Recommendations for Heritable Gene-Editing
AbstractGene-editing technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas9, are internationally ethically fraught. In the United States, policy surrounding gene-editing has yet to be implemented, while the science continues to speed ahead. However, it is not enough that policy be implemented: in order for policy to establish limits for the technology such that benefits are possible while threats are kept at bay, such policy must be ethical. In turn, the ethics of gene-editing is a culturally determined field of inquiry. This piece presents a proposal for a study whose goal is to arrive at ethical policy recommendations for policymakers. To ac...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - April 19, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Professional Oversight of Emergency-Use Interventions and Monitoring Systems: Ethical Guidance From the Singapore Experience of COVID-19
AbstractHigh degrees of uncertainty and a lack of effective therapeutic treatments have characterized the COVID-19 pandemic and the provision of drug products outside research settings has been controversial. International guidelines for providing patients with experimental interventions to treat infectious diseases outside of clinical trials exist but it is unclear if or how they should apply in settings where clinical trials and research are strongly regulated. We propose the Professional Oversight of Emergency-Use Interventions and Monitoring System (POEIMS) as an alternative pathway based on guidance developed for the ...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - April 14, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The (Un)Ethical Womb: The Promises and Perils of Artificial Gestation
AbstractThe purpose of this article is to reflect on the changes that the implementation of artificial wombs would bring to society, the family, and the concept of motherhood and fatherhood through the lens of two recent books: Helen Sedgwick ’sThe Growing Season and Rebecca Ann Smith ’sBaby X. Each of the two novels, set in a near future, follows the work of a scientist who develops artificial womb technology. Significantly, both women experience concerns about the technology and its long-term effects that make both of them leave their laboratories and rethink the technology they invented, while considering its many e...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - April 11, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Clinical Software and Bad Decisions: The “Practice Fusion” Settlement and Its Implications
(Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - April 11, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
How Resistance Shapes Health and Well-Being
AbstractResistance involves a range of actions such as disobedience, insubordination, misbehaviour, agitation, advocacy, subversion, and opposition. Action that occurs both publicly, privately, and day-to-day in the delivery of care, in discourse and knowledge. In this article I will demonstrate how resistance plays an important (but often overlooked) role in shaping health and well-being, for better and worse. To show how it can be largely productive and protective, I will argue that resistance intersects with health in at least two ways. First, it acts as an important counterbalance to power; undermining harmful policies...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - April 6, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Liminality: The Not-So-New Normal?
(Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - April 6, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Correction to: Should Doctors Offer Biomarker Testing to Those Afraid to Develop Alzheimer ’s Dementia?
(Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - April 4, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Liminality: A major category of the experience of cancer illness
AbstractNarrative analysis is well established as a means of examining the subjective experience of those who suffer chronic illness and cancer. In a study of perceptions of the outcomes of treatment of cancer of the colon, we have been struck by the consistency with which patients record three particular observations of their subjective experience: (1) the immediate impact of the cancer diagnosis and a persisting identification as a cancer patient, regardless of the time since treatment and of the presence or absence of persistent or recurrent disease; (2) a state of variable alienation from social familiars, expressed as...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - April 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Response —Liminality and the Mirage of Settlement
AbstractLittle and colleagues ’ (1998) paper describing a key aspect of cancer patients ’ experience, that of “liminality,” is remarkable for giving articulation to a very common and yet mostly overlooked aspect of patient experience. Little et. al. offered a formulation of liminality that deliberately set aside the concept’s more common use in analysing social rituals, in orde r to grasp at the interior experience that arises when failing bodily function and awareness of mortality are forced into someone’s consciousness, as occurs with a diagnosis of cancer. We set out the reasons as to why this analysis was s...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - April 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
