by Carl V Phillips
I continue to be appalled by what passes for ethical analysis in the realm of THR. This is clearly a symptom of the ethical failings of public health in general. Of course it is somewhat better to see someone actually trying to analyze ethics as compared to the normal “public health” approach of simply making a declarations about what should be done without any mention of what ethical goal they are basing that upon, let alone defending the legitimacy of that goal. The latter is a level of political discourse comparable to the average social media or comments section “debate”. But the attempts at analysis seem only to rise to the level of a freshman term paper.
The latest such analysis of ethics in this space is “Ethical considerations of e-cigarette use for tobacco harm reduction” by Caroline Franck, Kristian B. Filion, Jonathan Kimmelman, Roland Grad and Mark J. Eisenberg of McGill University. It appeared in Respiratory Research, which suggests a good rule of thumb: Do not get your advice on how to practice respiratory medicine from papers published in forums devoted to the study of ethics, and apply the same skepticism to an analysis of ethics in a respiratory medicine journal. Continue reading
