Virtue trumps duty

Caring for risky patients: duty or virtue?

The emergence several years ago of SARS, with its high rate of infection and death among healthcare workers, resurrected a recurring ethical question: do health professionals have a duty to provide care to patients with deadly infectious diseases, even at some substantial risk to themselves and their families? The conventional answer, repeated on the heels of the SARS epidemic, is that they do....

ICRP comes up trumps.

Talking Virtue: professionalism and virtue ethics

The twentieth century phenomenon of professionalism had a major impact on the economy of nation states and has been recognised as a key element of post-industrial societies. As an anointed class, professionals reserved the right to prescribe their own roles and responsibilities. Critics of professional interests, however, have described professionals’ own definition of their roles and responsib...

When equality trumps reciprocity

Abstract: Inequity aversion and reciprocity have been identified as two primary motivations underlying human decision making. However, because income and wealth inequality exist to some degree in all societies, these two key motivations can point to different decisions. In particular, when a beneficiary is less wealthy than a benefactor, a reciprocal action can lead to greater inequality. In th...

Troponin Trumps Common Sense

In the gender subgroup analysis of the CURE (Clopidogrel in Unstable Angina to Prevent Recurrent Events) trial data, we observed that fewer women across all Thrombolysis In Myocardial Infarction (TIMI) risk strata underwent coronary angiography compared to men (1). However, among women who did have significant coronary artery disease (CAD), an equal proportion went on to have coronary revascula...