Caregivers ’ Understanding of Informed Consent in a Randomized Control Trial
This study aimed to explore the effectiveness, and caregivers’ understandings, of the process of informed consent that accompanied their child’s participation i n a dental randomized control trial (RCT). Telephone interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of ten caregivers who each had a child participating in the RCT. Pre-tested closed and open-ended questions were used, and the findings were produced from an inductive analysis of the latter and a descriptive analysis of the former. Participants had limited understanding of the purpose of the RCT and rated the readability of the consent form more highly than...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 15, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Why Death Need Not Be “Reasonably Foreseeable”—The Proposed Legislative Response to Truchon and Gladu v Attorney General (Canada) and Attorney General (Quebec) [2019] QCCS 3792
(Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 15, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Black bodies and Bioethics: Debunking Mythologies of Benevolence and Beneficence in Contemporary Indigenous Health Research in Colonial Australia
AbstractWe seek to bring Black bodies and lives into full view within the enterprise of Indigenous health research to interrogate the unquestioned good that is taken to characterize contemporary Indigenous health research. We articulate a Black bioethics that is not premised upon a false logic of beneficence, rather we think through a Black bioethics premised upon an unconditional love for the Black body. We achieve this by examining the accounts of two Black mothers, fictional and factual rendering visible the racial violence Black bodies have been subjected to. We call for a Black bioethics that reimagines the Black body...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 14, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Addressing Structural Racism Through Constitutional Transformation and Decolonization: Insights for the New Zealand Health Sector
AbstractIn colonial states and settings, constitutional arrangements are often forged within contexts that serve to maintain structural racism against Indigenous people. In 2013 the New Zealand government initiated national conversations about the constitutional arrangements in Aotearoa. M āori (Indigenous) leadership preceded this, initiating a comprehensive engagement process among Māori in 2010, which resulted in a report by Matike Mai Aotearoa which articulated a collective Māori vision of a written constitution congruent withte Tiriti o Waitangi (the founding document of the colonial state of New Zealand) by 2040.T...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 11, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Bioethics, Race, and Contempt
AbstractThe U.S. healthcare system has a long history of displaying racist contempt toward Black people. From medical schools ’ use of enslaved bodies as cadavers to the widespread hospital practice of reporting suspected drug users who seek medical help to the police, the institutional practices and policies that have shaped U.S. healthcare systems as we know them cannot be minimized as coincidence. Rather, the very fou ndations of medical discovery, diagnosis, and treatment are built on racist contempt for Black people and have become self-perpetuating. Yet, I argue that bioethics and bioethicists have a role in combat...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 7, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The Role of Emotion in Understanding Whiteness
AbstractThis paper argues that stoicism as a central element of whiteness shapes, controls, and ultimately limits the experience and expression of emotion in public space. I explore how this may play out in particular medical settings like hospitals in Aotearoa New Zealand. I argue that working in conjunction with other values of whiteness identified by Myser (2003) —hyper-individualism, a contractual view of relationships, and an emphasis on personal control and autonomy—this makes hospitals emotionally unsafe spaces for Māori and other groups who place high importance in the collective sharing of emotion. Using deat...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 7, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Teasing out Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: An Ethical Critique of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Medicine
AbstractThe rapid adoption and implementation of artificial intelligence in medicine creates an ontologically distinct situation from prior care models. There are both potential advantages and disadvantages with such technology in advancing the interests of patients, with resultant ontological and epistemic concerns for physicians and patients relating to the instatiation of AI as a dependent, semi- or fully-autonomous agent in the encounter. The concept of libertarian paternalism potentially exercised by AI (and those who control it) has created challenges to conventional assessments of patient and physician autonomy. The...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 7, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Bioethicists Should Be Helping Scientists Think About Race
AbstractIn this essay, I argue that bioethicists have a thus-far unfulfilled role to play in helping life scientists, including medical doctors and researchers, think about race. I begin with descriptions of how life scientists tend to think about race and descriptions of typical approaches to bioethics. I then describe three different approaches to race: biological race, race as social construction, and race as cultural driver of history. Taking into account the historical and contemporary interplay of these three approaches, I suggest an alternative framework for thinking about race focused on how the idea of race functi...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 7, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
We ’re in This Together: A Reflection on How Bioethics and Public Health Can Collectively Advance Scientific Efforts Towards Addressing Racism
AbstractRacism is a key driver of the social, political, and economic injustices that cause and maintain health inequities. Over centuries and across continents, racism has become deeply ingrained within societies. Therefore, we believe that it is our professional and ethical obligation as scientists, and public health scholars specifically, to address racism head on in order to ameliorate racialized health disparities. We argue that greater focus is needed on addressingracism rather thanrace and how race is described or defined. We offer input from public health scholarship to help bioethicists and other scientists contri...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 7, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Race, Reproduction, and Biopolitics: A Review Essay
AbstractThis review essay critically examines Catherine Mills ’sBiopolitics (2018) and Camisha Russell ’sThe Assisted Reproduction of Race (2018). Although distinct works, the centrality of race and reproduction provides a point of connection and an opening into reframing contemporary debates within bioethicsand biopolitics. In reviewing these books together I hope to show how biopolitical theory and critical philosophy of race can be useful in looking at bioethical problems from a new perspective that open up different kinds of analyses, especially around historically embedded problems like institutional racism and th...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 6, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Conflicts of Interest Result From Relationships But Are Not Resolved by Preventing Relationships
AbstractGoldberg notes that the relationship is a component of Conflicts of Interests (COIs). Networks of relationships and the simultaneous presence of several interests are not negative per se but become so when they generate a conflict that undermines impartiality. The solution to the problem of COIs, therefore, cannot be to abolish relationships and the interests that they necessarily express but rather to verify whether those relationships are such as to unduly affect an individual ’s judgement. The evolution of an Italian legislation about COIs is eloquent in this regard. (Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 6, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Reply to: Beyond Money: Conscientious Objection in Medicine as a Conflict of Interests
AbstractGiubilini and Savulescu in their recentJournal of Bioethical Inquiry symposium article presented an account of conscientious objection that argues for its recognition as a non-financial conflict of interest. In this short commentary, I highlight some problems with their account. First, I discuss their solicitor analogy. Second, I discuss some problems surrounding their objectivity claim about standards of medical care. Next, I discuss some issues arising from consistently applying their approach. Finally, I highlight that conscientious objection should be viewed not as a conflict of interest but as something that s...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 6, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Medical Mistrust and Enduring Racism in South Africa
AbstractIn this essay, I argue that exploring institutional racism also needs to examine interactions and communications between patients and providers. Exchange between bioethicists, social scientists, and life scientists should emphasize the biological effects —made evident through health disparities—ofracism. I discuss this through examples of patient –provider communication in fertility clinics in South Africa and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to emphasize the issue of mistrust between patients and medical institutions. Health disparities and medical mistrust are interrelated problems of racism in healthcare prov...
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 5, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
In Defence of Forgetting Evil: A Reply to Pilkington on Conscientious Objection
AbstractIn a recent article for this journal, Bryan Pilkington (2019) makes a number of critical observations about one of our arguments for non-traditional medical conscientious objectors ’ duty to refer. Non-traditional conscientious objectors are those professionals who object to indirectly performing actions—like, say, referring to a physician who will perform an abortion. In our response here, we discuss his central objection and clarify our position on the role of value conf licts in non-traditional conscientious objection. (Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 5, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The Whiteness of Bioethics
AbstractA discussion of whiteness as an “ethos” or “relational category” in bioethics, drawing on examples from medical and historical research. (Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)
Source: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry - January 4, 2021 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
