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Browsing Politics publications by Author "Ankeny, R."
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Item Metadata only Commentary on ‘Better than numbers - a gentle critique of evidence-based medicine'(Federation Press, 2003) Ankeny, R.; Mackenzie, F.Item Metadata only Fertility, Human(Routledge, 2005) Ankeny, R.Item Metadata only Genetic Screening and Testing(Routledge, 2005) Ankeny, R.Item Metadata only Health care professionals' guide to religions.(Australasian Med Publ Co Ltd, 2007) Ankeny, R.Item Metadata only It's time to reframe the savior sibling debate(Taylor & Francis, 2011) Strong, K.; Jordens, C.; Kerridge, I.; Little, J.; Ankeny, R.The creation of savior siblings has been the subject of intense ethical debate over the past decade. While ethical concerns might provide clinicians with valid reasons for not providing these clinical services, we suggest that it is more difficult to make a case for physicians not disclosing to the parents of sick children under their care the option of creating a savior sibling. We “test” the ethical objections to savior siblings empirically and conclude that they rely heavily on unsound theoretical or speculative arguments and inappropriately scrutinize parental motives for having children. We contend that empirical evidence makes this moral frame increasingly tendentious, and that debate about savior siblings should be reframed as debate about the ethics of nondisclosure.Item Metadata only Medicine: Placebo or protector?(Amer Assoc Advancement Science, 2007) Ankeny, R.Dr. Golem . How to Think About Medicine. By Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch . University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005. 258 pp. $25, £17.50. ISBN 9780226113661. Collins and Pinch present eight case studies (including tonsillectomies, chronic fatigue syndrome, and vaccination) to explore the uncertainties and limitations of medical science.Item Restricted Narratives of 'terminal sedation', and the importance of the intention-foresight distinction in palliative care practice(Blackwell Publ Ltd, 2013) Douglas, C.; Kerridge, I.; Ankeny, R.The moral importance of the ‘intention–foresight’ distinction has long been a matter of philosophical controversy, particularly in the context of end-of-life care. Previous empirical research in Australia has suggested that general physicians and surgeons may use analgesic or sedative infusions with ambiguous intentions, their actions sometimes approximating ‘slow euthanasia’. In this paper, we report findings from a qualitative study of 18 Australian palliative care medical specialists, using in-depth interviews to address the use of sedation at the end of life. The majority of subjects were agnostic or atheistic. In contrast to their colleagues in acute medical practice, these Australian palliative care specialists were almost unanimously committed to distinguishing their actions from euthanasia. This commitment appeared to arise principally from the need to maintain a clear professional role, and not obviously from an ideological opposition to euthanasia. While some respondents acknowledged that there are difficult cases that require considered reflection upon one's intention, and where there may be some ‘mental gymnastics,’ the nearly unanimous view was that it is important, even in these difficult cases, to cultivate an intention that focuses exclusively on the relief of symptoms. We present four narratives of ‘terminal’ sedation – cases where sedation was administered in significant doses just before death, and may well have hastened death. Considerable ambiguities of intention were evident in some instances, but the discussion around these clearly exceptional cases illustrates the importance of intention to palliative care specialists in maintaining their professional roles.Item Restricted Patenting the PKU test: federally funded research and intellectual property(Massachusetts Medical Society, 2013) Paul, D.; Ankeny, R.Item Restricted Re-thinking organisms: The impact of databases on model organism biology(Pergamon, 2012) Leonelli, S.; Ankeny, R.Community databases have become crucial to the collection, ordering and retrieval of data gathered on model organisms, as well as to the ways in which these data are interpreted and used across a range of research contexts. This paper analyses the impact of community databases on research practices in model organism biology by focusing on the history and current use of four community databases: FlyBase, Mouse Genome Informatics, WormBase and The Arabidopsis Information Resource. We discuss the standards used by the curators of these databases for what counts as reliable evidence, acceptable terminology, appropriate experimental set-ups and adequate materials (e.g., specimens). On the one hand, these choices are informed by the collaborative research ethos characterising most model organism communities. On the other hand, the deployment of these standards in databases reinforces this ethos and gives it concrete and precise instantiations by shaping the skills, practices, values and background knowledge required of the database users. We conclude that the increasing reliance on community databases as vehicles to circulate data is having a major impact on how researchers conduct and communicate their research, which affects how they understand the biology of model organisms and its relation to the biology of other species.Item Metadata only The brave new world of cloning(Spinney Press, 2003) Ankeny, R.Item Restricted Using cases to establish novel diagnoses: creating generic facts by making particular facts travel together(Cambridge University Press, 2011) Ankeny, R.; Howlett, P.; Morgan, M.Introduction Although some critics have questioned the epistemological value of cases, the case report continues to be exceedingly popular within medicine. It is estimated that 40,000 new case report publications are entered into the Medline database each year, with the core one hundred twenty clinical journals, on average, having 13.5 per cent of their references devoted to case reports (Rosselli and Otero 2002). In most of these journals, there are specific guidelines for what must be presented in a case report and what warrants reporting. The Lancet has a long history of publishing case reports, and began a peer-reviewed section in 1995 aimed at allowing clinicians an outlet for publication, with a particular focus on reports that have a ‘striking message’ (Bignall and Horton 1995). The New England Journal of Medicine includes brief case reports, which usually describe one to three patients or a single family, as well as case records from Massachusetts General Hospital. Many case reports begin as notifications published in the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report (MMWR) of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), particularly if they are describing infectious or other types of diseases with serious public health implications. In general, the overwhelming majority of case reports depict complaints arising in specialty or subspecialty settings, and describe uncommon or even ‘unique’ clinical occurrences (McCarthy and Reilly 2000). A recent review of case studies noted that many cases report rare conditions for which trials of various types of therapies (particularly randomised or controlled trials) are not feasible due to low patient numbers or other issues, but that some cases are well received and can influence research as well as clinical practice (Albrecht et al. 2005). In contemporary medicine, cases may offer what is considered to be fairly definitive evidence in modern scientific terms, especially, for instance, with regard to unusual or unexpected occurrences such as adverse drug reactions (see, e.g., Aronson and Hauben 2006; Glasziou et al. 2007; Hauben and Aronson 2007). It is claimed that a good case study ‘begets awareness, jogs the memory and aids understanding’ (Morgan 1985, p. 353), a description that indicates the mixture of educative and epistemologic goals inherent in cases.