Our editorial explores the need to create a nurturing ecology for good research and how far the New Education Policy, 2019, will facilitate this. Exploring medical education further, authors in two articles assert the need to embed humanities in the medical curriculum, and to value medical teaching as a moral enterprise, if it is to produce competent and ethical doctors.
Moving into practice, a discussion deals with how far an ethical doctor should advise a patient about her/ his personal life without breaching confidentiality. An author looks at the thin line between patients participating fruitfully in their treatment, and infringing on the doctor’s professional responsibility. An article examines the impact of site monitoring visits by ethics committees on compliance with research standards. Two reports and letters summarise the consultations on controlled human infection model studies and their possible introduction in India.
In the wider world, we have an article tracking the unethical marketing of OxyContin in the USA, that country’s ‘gag’ on aid to countries allowing abortion, and the personal response of a senior bioethicist to the 14th World Congress of Bioethics in 2018.
Cover credit: ‘Elephant’, courtesy of Dr Sameer Rao