Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy 
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This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.Against age limits for men in reproductive care
This article departs from the principle of reproductive autonomy and aconditional positive right to receive ART, and asks whether there are convincing arguments to also impose age limits on aspiring fathers. After considering three consequentialist approaches to justifying age limits for aspiring fathers, we take in a concrete normative stance by concluding that those are not strong enough to justify such cut-offs. We reinforce our position by drawing a comparison between the case of a 39-year-old woman who wants to become a single mother via a sperm donor on the one hand, and on the other hand the same woman who wants to ...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - April 23, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Institutional design and moral conflict in health care priority-setting
AbstractPriority-setting policy-makers often face moral and political pressure to balance the conflicting motivations ofefficiency andrescue/non-abandonment. Using the conflict between these motivations as a case study can enrich the understanding of institutional design in developed democracies. This essay presents a cognitive-psychological account of the conflict between efficiency and rescue/non-abandonment in health care priority-setting. It then describes three sets of institutional arrangements —in Australia, England/Wales, and Germany, respectively—that contend with this conflict in interestingly different ways....
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - April 4, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Vision, body and interpretation in medical imaging diagnostics
This article explores the profound impact of visualism and visual perception in the context of medical imaging diagnostics. It emphasizes the intricate interplay among vision, embodiment, subjectivity, language, and historicity within the realm of medical science and technology, with a specific focus on image consciousness. The study delves into the role of subjectivity in perception, facilitating the communication of opacity and historicity to the perceiving individual. Additionally, it scrutinizes the image interpretation process, drawing parallels to text interpretation and highlighting the influence of personal biases ...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - April 4, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
No (true) right to die: barriers in access to physician-assisted death in case of psychiatric disease, advanced dementia or multiple geriatric syndromes in the Netherlands
AbstractEven in the Netherlands, where the practice of physician-assisted death (PAD) has been legalized for over 20 years, there is no such thing as a ‘right to die’. Especially patients with extraordinary requests, such as a wish for PAD based on psychiatric suffering, advanced dementia, or (a limited number of) multiple geriatric syndromes, encounter barriers in access to PAD. In this paper, we discuss whether these barriers can be justified in the context of the Dutch situation where PAD is legally permitted for those who suffer unbearably and hopelessly as a result of medical conditions. Furthermore, we explore wh...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - February 20, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
A critical view on using “life not worth living” in the bioethics of assisted reproduction
AbstractThis paper critically engages with howlife not worth living (LNWL) and cognate concepts are used in the field of beginning-of-life bioethics as the basis of arguments for morally requiring the application of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and/or germline genome editing (GGE). It is argued that an objective conceptualization of LNWL is largely too unreliable in beginning-of-life cases for deriving decisive normative reasons that would constitute a moral duty on the part of intending parents. Subjective frameworks are found to be more suitable to determine LNWL, but they are not accessible in beginning-of-li...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - February 16, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
From a critique of the principle of autonomy to an ethic of heteronomy
AbstractEtymologically, autonomy is the ability to give oneself rules and follow them. It is an important principle of medical ethics, which can sometimes raise some tensions in the care relationship. We propose a new definition of ethics, the ethics of heteronomy: a self-normative, discursive and responsible autonomy. Autonomy cannot be considered without the responsibility each person must have towards others. In the care relationship, autonomy would be more the ability of each person to reach out to others than the ability to decide alone. The care relationship must be seen as an accompaniment of equals where each perso...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - January 11, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The duty of care and the right to be cared for: is there a duty to treat the unvaccinated?
AbstractVaccine hesitancy or refusal has been one of the major obstacles to herd immunity against Covid-19 in high-income countries and one of the causes for the emergence of variants. The refusal of people who are eligible for vaccination to receive vaccination creates an ethical dilemma between the duty of healthcare professionals (HCPs) to care for patients and their right to be taken care of. This paper argues for an extended social contract between patients and society wherein vaccination against Covid-19 is conceived as essential for the protection of the right of healthcare providers to be taken care of. Thus, a dut...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - January 5, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Sharing a medical decision
AbstractDuring the last decades, shared decision making (SDM) has become a very popular model for the physician-patient relationship. SDM can refer to a process (making a decisionin a shared way) and a product (making ashared decision). In the literature, by far most attention is devoted to the process. In this paper, I investigate the product, wondering what is involved by a medical decision being shared. I argue that the degree to which a decision to implement a medical alternative is shared should be determined by taking into account six considerations: (i) how the physician and the patient rank that alternative, (ii) t...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - November 27, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Editors ’ statement on the responsible use of generative AI technologies in scholarly journal publishing
AbstractGenerative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform many aspects of scholarly publishing. Authors, peer reviewers, and editors might use AI in a variety of ways, and those uses might augment their existing work or might instead be intended to replace it. We are editors of bioethics and humanities journals who have been contemplating the implications of this ongoing transformation. We believe that generative AI may pose a threat to the goals that animate our work but could also be valuable for achieving those goals. In the interests of fostering a wider conversation about how generative AI may be ...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - October 20, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Rethinking advanced motherhood: a new ethical narrative
AbstractThe aim of the study is to rethink the ethics of advanced motherhood. In the literature, delayed childbearing is usually discussed in the context of reproductive justice, and in relationship to ethical issues associated with the use and risk of assisted reproductive technologies. We aim to go beyond these more “traditional” ways in which reproductive ethics is framed by revisiting ethics itself through the lens of the figure of the so-called “older” mother. For this purpose, we start by exploring some of the deep seated socio-cultural discourses in the context of procreation: ageism, ableism and t he widesp...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - September 3, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
A fair exchange: why living kidney donors in England should be financially compensated
AbstractEvery year, hundreds of patients in England die whilst waiting for a kidney transplant, and this is evidence that the current system of altruistic-based donation is not sufficient to address the shortage of kidneys available for transplant. To address this problem, we propose a monopsony system whereby kidney donors can opt-in to receive financial compensation, whilst still preserving the right of individuals to donate without receiving any compensation. A monopsony system describes a market structure where there is only one ‘buyer’—in this case the National Health Service. By doing so, several hundred lives ...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - August 24, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Popperian methodology and the Semmelweis case*
AbstractSemmelweis ’ discovery of the etiology of childbed fever has long attracted the attention of historians of medicine and biographers. In recent years it has also become of increasing interest to philosophers. In this paper I discuss the interpretation of Semmelweis’ methodology from the viewpoint of the inf erence to the best explanation and argue that Popperian methodology is better at capturing the dynamics of the growth of knowledge. Furthermore, I criticize the attempts to explain the failure of Semmelweis to have his discovery accepted on the basis of the Kuhnian concept of paradigms, and warn tha t this vi...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - August 16, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Authenticity and the argument from testability: a bottom-up approach
AbstractJesper Ahlin Marceta published an article in this journal in which he formulated his “argument from testability”, stating that it is impossible, at least practically, to operationalize procedural authenticity. That is, using procedural accounts of authenticity, one cannot reliably differentiate between authentic and inauthentic desires. There are roughly two ways to respond to t he argument from testability: top-down and bottom-up. Several authors have endeavored the top-down approach by trying to show that some conceptions of authenticity might be operationalizable after all. At present, however, the bottom-up...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - August 16, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
What ’s wrong with medical black box AI?
(Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy)
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - July 30, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The epistemic harms of direct-to-consumer genetic tests
AbstractIn this paper, I provide an epistemic evaluation of the harms that result from the widespread marketing of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests. While genetic tests are a valuable accessory diagnostic tool when ordered by a medical practitioner, there are different implications when they are sold directly to consumers. I aim to show that there are both epistemic and non-epistemic harms associated with the widespread commoditization of DTC genetic tests. I argue that the epistemic harms produced by DTC genetic tests have been disregarded in discussions on the topic. Drawing on the notion of contributory epistemic ...
Source: Medicine, Healthcare and Philosophy - July 25, 2023 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
