Evaluating the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee ’s position on the implausible effectiveness of homeopathic treatments
AbstractIn 2009, the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC) conducted an ‘evidence check’ on homeopathy to evaluate evidence for its effectiveness. In common with the wider literature critical of homeopathy, the STC report seems to endorse many of the strong claims that are made about its implausibility. In contrast with the critical literature, however, the STC repo rt explicitly does not place any weight on implausibility in its evaluation. I use the contrasting positions of the STC and the wider critical literature to examine the ‘implausibility arguments’ against homeopathy and the place of ...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - July 4, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The muddle of medicalization: pathologizing or medicalizing?
AbstractMedicalization appears to be an issue that is both ubiquitous and unquestionably problematic as it seems to signal at once a social and existential threat. This perception of medicalization, however, is nothing new. Since the first main writings in the 1960s and 1970s, it has consistently been used to describe inappropriate or abusive instances of medical authority. Yet, while this standard approach claims that medicalization is a growing problem, it assumes that there is simply one “medical model” and that the expanding realm of “the medical” can be more or less clearly delineated. Moreover, while intended...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - July 4, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Re-evaluating concepts of biological function in clinical medicine: towards a new naturalistic theory of disease
This article attempts to move towards a new naturalistic theory of disease that overcomes the limitations of previous definitions and offers advantages in the clinical setting. Our approach involves a re-evaluation of concepts of biological function employed by naturalistic theories. Drawing on recent insights from the philosophy of biology, we develop a contextual and evaluative account of function that is better suited to clinical medicine and remains consistent with contemporary naturalism. We also show how an updated naturalistic view shares important affinities with normativist and phenomenological positions, suggesti...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - June 28, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
From method to hermeneutics: which epistemological framework for narrative medicine?
AbstractThe past 10 years have seen considerable developments in the use of narrative in medicine, primarily through the emergence of the so-called narrative medicine. In this article, I question narrative medicine’s self-understanding and contend that one of the most prominent issues is its lack of a clear epistem ological framework. Drawing from Gadamer’s work on hermeneutics, I first show that narrative medicine is deeply linked with the hermeneutical field of knowledge. Then I try to identify which claims can be legitimately expected from narrative medicine, and which ones cannot be. I scrutinize in part icular w...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - May 13, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Alex Broom: Dying: a social perspective on the end of life
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - May 10, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Chronicles of communication and power: informed consent to sterilisation in the Namibian Supreme Court ’s LM judgment of 2015
This article analyses the reasoning and factual narratives of the judgment by applying Neil Manson and Onora O ’Neill’s approach to informed consent as a communicative process. This is done in an effort to understand the practical import of the judgment in the particular context of resource constrained public healthcare facilities through which many women in southern Africa access reproductive healthcare . While the judgment affirms certain established tenets in informed consent to surgical procedures, aspects of the reasoning in context demand more particularised applications of what it means for a patient to have cap...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - April 1, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Hearing sub-Saharan African voices in bioethics
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 30, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Partiality and distributive justice in African bioethics
AbstractAfrican ethical theories tend to hold that moral agents ought to be partial, in the sense that they should favour members of their family or close community. This is considered an advantage over the impartiality of many Western moral theories, which are regarded as having counterintuitive implications, such as the idea that it is unethical to save a family member before a stranger. The partiality of African ethics is thought to be particularly valuable in the context of bioethics. Thaddeus Metz, in particular, argues that his African-derived theory best accounts for a number of plausible intuitions, such as the int...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 27, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Giving voice to African thought in medical research ethics
AbstractIn this article, I consider the virtual absence of an African voice and perspective in global discourses of medical research ethics against the backdrop of the high burden of diseases and epidemics on the continent and the fact that the continent is actually the scene of numerous and sundry medical research studies. I consider some reasons for this state of affairs as well as how the situation might be redressed. Using examples from the HIV/AIDS and Ebola epidemics, I attempt to show that the marginalization of Africa in medical research and medical research ethics is deliberate rather than accidental. It is causal...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 25, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Ancillary care obligations in light of an African bioethic: from entrustment to communion
AbstractHenry Richardson recently published the first book ever devoted to ancillary care obligations, which roughly concern what medical researchers are morally required to provide to participants beyond what safety requires. In it, Richardson notes that he is presenting the ‘only fully elaborated view out there’ on this topic, which he calls the ‘partial-entrustment model’. In this article, I provide a new theory of ancillary care obligations, one that is grounded on ideals of communion salient in the African philosophical tradition and that is intended to riva l and surpass Richardson’s model, which is a funct...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 15, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Dealing with the other between the ethical and the moral: albinism on the African continent
AbstractAlbinism is a global public health issue but it assumes a peculiar nature in the African continent due, in part, to the social stigma faced by persons with albinism (PWAs) in Africa. I argue that there are two essential reasons for this precarious situation. First, in the African consciousness, albinism is an alterity or otherness. The PWA in Africa is not merely a physical other but also an ontological other in the African community of beings, which provides a hermeneutic for the stigmatising separateness or difference of the PWA. The second reason hinges on a distinction drawn by J ürgen Habermas between the eth...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 14, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Franklin G. Miller and Robert D. Truog: Death, dying, and organ transplantation: reconstructing medical ethics at the end of life
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 24, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Erratum to: Solidarity, justice, and recognition of the other
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 22, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Clashes of consensus: on the problem of both justifying abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome and rejecting infanticide
AbstractAlthough the abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome has become commonplace, infanticide is still widely rejected. Generally, there are three ways of justifying the differentiation between abortion and infanticide: by referring to the differences between the moral status of the fetus versus the infant, by referring to the differences of the moral status of the act of abortion versus the act of infanticide, or by separating the way the permissibility of abortion is justified from the way the impermissibility of infanticide is justified. My argument is that none of these ways justifies the abortion of fetuses diagnose...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 9, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Erratum to: The causal explanatory functions of medical diagnoses
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 9, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
