By Miranda Qianyu Wang On 15 December 2025, Ant Group rebranded its healthcare app as “Ant Afu,” repositioning it from a diagnostic tool to an “AI Health Friend.” Embedded within Alipay – the digital payment platform used daily by over a billion people in China – Afu offers personalised health companionship and connects users directly […]
Latest articles
A Confucian virtue ethics approach to medical internship in Hong Kong
By Trevor T. W. Wan and Wai Tak Victor Li In Hong Kong, an internship, also called housemanship, is a 12-month period during which fresh medical graduates rotate across four departments in public hospitals and acquire hands-on clinical experience through daily care of patients. Yet this phase is fraught with inherent tension: interns, with relatively […]
Placebos and ethics in digital therapeutics
By Jacqueline Lutz & Lindsay Ayearst In applied digital health, questions about evidence generation are inseparable from how products are built and whether they ever reach patients. Many scientists working on digital therapeutics are academically trained to run controlled clinical studies, behavioral experiments, or to study specific behavioral intervention mechanisms. That rigor does not disappear […]
Considering the ethics of sedation, with an eye on euthanasia and treatment withdrawal
By Hitoshi Arima Today, many people spend their final days in a medically induced sleep. According to a survey conducted in Japan, just under 20 percent of people who die from cancer receive some form of sedation. Patients approaching death may experience extremely severe suffering. For example, a cancerous tumor may invade areas dense with […]
Testing AI in real-world medical ethics
By Daniel Sokol This post adds to the literature on AI in medical ethics by testing how freely available AI models perform when presented with realistic ethical scenarios relevant to clinical practice. In May 2025, I wrote a blog about ChatGPT’s performance in an ‘honesty test’ for clinicians. It scored an impressive 43/44, outperforming the […]
When embryo-likeness has moral consequences
By Dr. Johnny Sakr Everyone agrees that stem cell–derived embryo models are not embryos. The harder question is whether that biological distinction is doing more ethical work than it can plausibly bear. In my recent response in the Journal of Medical Ethics, I argue that much of the disagreement about embryo models turns on a […]
LLMs and mental health: A problem still unaddressed
By Bosco Garcia, Eugene Chua and Harman Brah ChatGPT made tragic news at the end of the summer with the case of Adam Raine, a teenage boy who, after a series of conversations with the model, ended up taking his life. The parents have initiated a lawsuit, alleging that ChatGPT acted as a “suicide coach”, […]
The ethically problematic allure of philanthrotainment story telling
By Jeremy Snyder Using entertainment to encourage giving for health-related causes isn’t new. However, health-related ‘philanthrotainment’ has evolved recently with the help of online content creators like Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known as MrBeast. My article “The Ethics of Online Health-Related Philanthrotainment” discusses how this marriage of social media influencers and philanthropic fundraising can create […]
Why I changed my mind about the dead donor rule
By Lawrence Masek Must organ transplant teams wait until a potential donor dies before removing a vital organ? I used to answer yes, because removing a vital organ from a living donor seemed intuitively wrong, and I assumed that anyone who answered no either accepted a consequentialist view of organ transplants or denied that potential […]
Assisted dying in England and Wales: Arranging provision and at what cost?
By Alexandra Mullock, Suzanne Ost, and Nancy Preston With lawful assisted dying (AD) on the horizon in England and Wales with the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, and elsewhere in and around the UK (Isle of Man, Jersey, Scotland), important questions about how best to establish a service to provide safe access to […]