Correspondence to Professor John McMillan, Bioethics Centre, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; john.r.mcmillan68{at}gmail.com Since their public launch, a little over a year ago, large ...

Objectives—The study was performed in order to investigate how end-of-life decisions are influenced by cultural and sociopolitical circumstances and to explore the compliance of doctors with patient ...

A lot of medical procedures can be justified in terms of the number of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) they can be expected to generate; that is, the number of extra years that the procedure will ...

Objectives—To investigate the incidence and solution of ethical dilemmas in a palliative care unit. Design—Health care workers recorded daily all dilemmas in caring for each patient.

Case 1 reminds us that patients have duties too, while case 2 presents an instance of justified withholding of information How refreshing to read these two cases! No conjoined twins, fantastical ...

Correspondence to: J McMillan Department of Philosophy, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK; john.mcmillan{at}hyms.ac.uk The Social Value Judgments consultation document reveals NICE’s failure to ...

The prophylactic use of antibiotics has become a routine procedure in many areas of medicine. In neurosurgery, however, there is considerable debate over their use in the prevention of postoperative ...

Medical school curricula and postgraduate education programmes expend considerable resources teaching medical ethics. Simultaneously, whistleblowers’ agitation continues, at great personal cost, to ...

Correspondence to Conor Toale, Department of Surgical Affairs, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dublin, Ireland; conortoale{at}rcsi.com A deontological approach to surgical ethics advocates that ...

The trend towards postponement of childbearing has seen increasing numbers of women turning towards oocyte banking for anticipated gamete exhaustion (AGE banking), which offers a realistic chance of ...

The practice of coercive measures in psychiatry is controversial. Although some have suggested that it may be acceptable if patients are a danger to others or to themselves, others committed ...