Relational autonomy and the clinical relationship in dementia care
AbstractThe clinical relationship (or doctor-patient relationship) has been underexplored in dementia care. This is in part due to the way that the clinical relationship has been articulated and understood in bioethics. Robert Veatch ’s social contract model is representative of a standard view of the clinical relationship in bioethics. But dementia presents formidable challenges to the standard clinical relationship, including ambiguity about when the clinical relationship begins, how it weathers changes in narrative identity of patients with dementia, and how the intimate involvement of family fits alongside a paradigm...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - May 17, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
A defense of surgical procedures regulation
AbstractSince the advent of drug regulation in 1962, regulatory agencies have been in the practice of using strict standards to test the safety and efficacy of medical treatments and products. Regulatory agencies, such as the FDA, demand two full-fledged Randomized Clinical Trials demonstrating the safety and effectiveness of drugs to grant its marketing authorization. On the contrary, surgical treatments are left completely unregulated. There are several reasons explaining this difference, and all of them point to the difficulty of conducting well-designed RCTs in surgery. However, we argue that none of these arguments is...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - May 12, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Thomas Boggatz (ed.): Quality of life and person-centered care for older people
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - April 16, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Defending secular clinical ethics expertise from an Engelhardt-inspired sense of theoretical crisis
AbstractThe national standards for clinical ethics consultation set forth by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) endorse an “ethics facilitation” approach, which characterizes the role of the ethicist as one skilled at facilitating consensus within the range of ethically acceptable options. To determine the range of ethically acceptable options, ASBH recommends the standard model of decision-making (informed consent, advance directives, surrogates, best interests), which is grounded in the values of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. has sharply criticize...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - April 2, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
To harvest, procure, or receive? Organ transplantation metaphors and the technological imaginary
AbstractOne must technologize bodies to conceive of organ transplantation. Organs must be envisioned as replaceable parts, serving mechanical functions for the workings of the body. In this way, it becomes possible to imagine exchanging someone ’s organs without changing anything essential about the selfhood of the person. But to envision organs as mechanical parts is phenomenologically uncomfortable; thus, the terminology used to describe the practice of organ retrieval seems to attempt other, less technological ways of viewing the huma n body. In this paper, I analyze three common metaphors that currently contextualize...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - April 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Correction to: Transposon dynamics and the epigenetic switch hypothesis
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 22, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Correction to: Pain priors, polyeidism, and predictive power: a preliminary investigation into individual differences in ordinary thought about pain
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 21, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Introducing philosophy of medicine: three new books
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 4, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The inviolateness of life and equal protection: a defense of the dead-donor rule
AbstractThere are increasing calls to reject the dead-donor rule and permit organ donation euthanasia in organ transplantation. I argue that the fundamental problem with this proposal is that it would bestow more worth on the organs than on the donor who possesses them. What is at stake is the basis of human equality, which, I argue, should be based on an ineliminable dignity that each of us has in virtue of having a rational nature. To allow mortal harvesting would be to make our worth contingent upon variable quality-of-life judgments that can be based only on properties that come in degrees. Thus, rejecting the dead-don...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - March 4, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Is the replication crisis a base-rate fallacy?
AbstractIs science in the midst of a crisis of replicability and false discoveries? In a recent article, Alexander Bird offers an explanation for the apparent lack of replicability in the biomedical sciences. Bird argues that the surprise at the failure to replicate biomedical research is a result of the fallacy of neglecting the base rate. The base-rate fallacy arises in situations in which one ignores the base rate —or prior probability—of an event when assessing the probability of this event in the light of some observed evidence. By extension, the replication crisis would result from ignoring the low prior probabil...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 27, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Maureen L. Condic: Untangling twinning: what science tells us about the nature of human embryos
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 27, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Philosophy of medicine in 2021
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 27, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Wakefield ’s harmful dysfunction analysis of disorder and the problem of defining harm to nonsentient organisms
AbstractThis paper criticizes Jerome Wakefield ’s harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) of disorder by arguing that the conceptual linkage it establishes between the medical concepts of health and disorder and the prudential notions of well-being and harm makes the account inapplicable to nonsentient organisms, such as plants, fungi, and many inv ertebrate animals. Drawing on a previous formulation of this criticism by Christopher Boorse, and noting that Wakefield could avoid it if he adopted a partly biofunction-based account of interests like that often advocated in the field of environmental ethics, I argue that integrat...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 24, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The prospects of precision psychiatry
AbstractSince the turn of the twenty-first century, biomedical psychiatry around the globe has embraced the so-called precision medicine paradigm, a model for medical research that uses innovative techniques for data collection and analysis to reevaluate traditional theories of disease. The goal of precision medicine is to improve diagnostics by restratifying the patient population on the basis of a deeper understanding of disease processes. This paper argues that precision is ill-fitting for psychiatry for two reasons. First, in psychiatry, unlike in fields like oncology, precision medicine has been understood as an ...
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - February 1, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Correction to: Experimental philosophy of medicine and the concepts of health and disease
(Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)
Source: Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - January 10, 2022 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
