This paper discusses some of the ethical and legal issues that the recommendations contained in the Cass Review raise. It focuses, in particular, on the recommendation that hormonal treatment in the ...

Risk–benefit assessment is a routine requirement for research ethics committees that review and oversee biomedical research with human subjects. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how to weigh and ...

The Mental Capacity Act received Royal Assent on 7 April 2005, and it will be implemented in 2007. The Act defines when someone lacks capacity and it supports people with limited decision-making ...

Decision-making is a prominent theme in this edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics . Our feature article examines the relationship between trust and informed consent. Informed consent is, of course ...

Objectives: to assess physicians’ and patients’ views in Saudi Arabia (KSA) towards involving the patient versus the family in the process of diagnosis disclosure and decision-making, and to compare ...

This paper engages with the question of what it is to ‘do good medical ethics’ in two ways. It begins with an exploration of what it might mean to say that health professionals practise good medical ...

Whose values should count – those of patients or the general public – when adopting the quality-adjusted life year (QALY) framework for healthcare decision making is a long-standing debate. Specific ...

This paper argues that the new commercial and quasi-commercial activities of medicine, scientists, pharmaceutical companies and industry with regard to human tissue has given rise to a whole new way ...

Introduction. The 14-day rule restricts the culturing of human embryos in vitro for scientific research to a maximum of 14 days. Proposed by the UK’s Warnock Committee in 1984,1 it was implemented in ...

This essay seeks to characterise the essential features of an equitable health care system in terms of the classical Aristotelian concepts of horizontal and vertical equity, the common (but ...

“Futility” is a word which means the absence of benefit. It has been used to describe an absence of utility in resuscitation endeavours but it fails to do this. Futility does not consider the harms of ...

Physicians and other healthcare professionals are increasingly finding ways to use artificial intelligent decision support systems (AI-DSS) in their work. IBM Watson Health, for example, is a ...