Category: Discussions
October 20, 2018
The crisis that has emerged around the expulsion of Peter Gøtzsche from the Cochrane Board seems at first sight to be the outcome of a typical power play. However, the structural issues that have led to the crisis have emerged in a more technical criticism. These include lack of transparency, lac...
R Srivatsan
August 11, 2018
The Bawaskars in their Comment "Emergency care in rural settings: Can doctors be ethical and survive?" raise a context-specific question about the sustainability of emergency care in rural, low resource areas. This could be broadened to "What efforts are needed to sustain emergency care systems r...
Yogesh Jain, Sushil B Patil, Gajanan B Phutke
July 30, 2018
Bawaskar and Bawaskar in their paper titled "Emergency care in rural settings: Can doctors be ethical and survive?" in this journal have presented a very real problem faced by small private healthcare facilities in rural areas. They raise the important question of whether doctors can be true to e...
Dheeraj Kattula
May 03, 2018
We describe below the pressures of running a small private hospital in an underserved rural area, while providing emergency healthcare for victims of poisonous stings, accidents, and other acute health conditions. Both ethics and law demand that payment is not asked for upfront in emergency cases...
Himmatrao Saluba Bawaskar, Pramodini Himmatrao Bawaskar
February 13, 2017
I believe Dr Winker and I agree more than differ about the need for authors of medical journal reports of randomised controlled trial (RCT) findings to acknowledge when they make post hoc adjustments to the original content that they submit to obtain FDA marketing approval for a new drug or medic...
John H Noble Jr
February 13, 2017
We were surprised to read Dr Noble's article, "Truth in research labelling". Dr Noble quotes from an email exchange he and I had regarding a petition that he had asked the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) to endorse (personal communication, Bernard Carroll and John Noble, September 27,...
Margaret Winker
January 27, 2017
The aim of the comment "Use of pellet guns for crowd control in Kashmir: How lethal is 'non-lethal'?" was neither to disparage the armed forces, nor recommend counterinsurgency strategies, nor support any particular community or group. It sought to raise discussions around the question pointed ou...
Siddarth David
January 27, 2017
This refers to the comment "Use of pellet guns for crowd control in Kashmir: How lethal is 'non-lethal'?" by Siddarth David in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. My objection is not to the ethics of the use of pellet guns, but to the ethics of publishing such an article in a journal devoted to...
Ravindra B Ghooi
August 08, 2016
In his excellent article about commercial conflict of interest, Mark Wilson quotes Dennis Thompson, a political scientist who provided a searching analysis of the concept of conflict of interest (Col). Using Thompson's analysis, Wilson writes: "Determining whether factors such as ambition, the pu...
Ruth Macklin
August 24, 2016
I read with interest the comment by Mark Wilson in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics regarding bias and conflicts of interest in medical journals. Wilson targets one journal (the New England Journal of Medicine: NEJM) and one particular "scandal" to make his point that journa...
Ian Harris