Online research in philosophy

This article constitutes excerpts of a videotaped discussion hosted by the New England Journal of Medicine on January 14, 2008, concerning a range of topics on lethal injection prompted by the United States Supreme Court's January 7 oral arguments in Baze v. Rees. Dr. Atul Gawande moderated the roundtable that included two anesthesiologists - Dr. Robert Truog and Dr. David Waisel - as well as law professor Deborah Denno. The discussion focused on the drugs used in lethal injection (...) executions, whether physicians should participate, potential alternatives, and some of the legal parameters of Baze. (shrink)

Cunningham and Kavic [1] rightly note that standard accounts of surgical complications—ours included—have focused on postoperative events [2, 3]. As they point out, this postoperative focus leaves open the question of how we should categorize adverse intraoperative events. They argue that we should distinguish between two types of adverse intraoperative events: those that introduce additional risk of postoperative complications and those that do not. On their account, adverse intraoperative events that introduce additional risk of postoperative complications are intraoperative complications, whereas (...) those that do not are simple errors. Cunningham and Kavic say little about why we might want to make this distinction. We take it that the underlying purpose is to focus attention on the importance of diligence in surgical performance. Gawande defines diligence as ‘‘the necessity of giving sufficient attention to detail to avoid error and prevail against obstacles’’ [4, p. 8]. It is clear that diligence in surgery requires us to attend not just to those adverse intraoperative events that lead to postoperative complications but also to adverse intraoperative events that increase the risk of postoperative complications. We wholeheartedly agree about the importance of diligence in surgery, both in the intraoperative and the.. (shrink)