In the face of limited resources during the COVID-19 pandemic response, public health experts and ethicists have sought to apply guiding principles in determining how those resources, including vaccines, should be allocated.

In the article “Informed Consent: What Must be Disclosed and What Must be Understood?” Joseph Millum and Danielle Bromwich argue that informed consent requires satisfaction of certain disclosure an...

Childress et al. (2023) present the case of a patient with capacity who requests to stay on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) indefinitely and highlight the ethical challenges associated w...

Liao and Carbonell explore how oppressive medical technologies constitute materiality insofar as they reflect past oppression, embody oppression in the present day, and carry oppression into the fu...

Libertarian paternalism describes the idea of nudging—that is, steering individual decision-making while preserving freedom of choice. In medicine, libertarian paternalism has gained widespread attention, specifically with respect to interventions designed to promote healthy behaviours. Some scholars argue that nudges appropriately balance autonomy and paternalistic beneficence, while others argue that nudges inherently exploit cognitive weaknesses. This paper further explores the ethics of libertarian paternalism in public health. The use of nudges may infringe on an individual’s voluntary choice, autonomy and informed consent, (...) but they are ethically justified when there is a clear public health benefit to the manipulation of choice. (shrink)

The dominant discourse on dementia promotes a view that as individuals progress with the disease, they experience a neurological decline causing a loss of self. This notion, grounded in a Cartesian representation of selfhood, associates a loss of self as directly related to cognition. This paper presents an alternative anthropological framework, embodied selfhood, that challenges this representation. It then examines a potential tool, graphic medicine, to translate this theory into caregiving practice. Through analyzing three graphic novels—Wrinkles, Tangles, and Aliceheimer’s—this paper (...) demonstrates how tension exists between different conceptions of selfhood and associated implications for caregivers and patients alike. (shrink)