The tortured patient: an ethical dilemma project

The authors make a well sourced and closely argued attempt to reveal the multi layers and complexities involved when looking at members of the medical profession being complicit in torture. They do this through a number of lenses including that of assisted and shared intention (though comparing it to Catholic concepts of material and formal complicity seemed extraneous). The authors state that their use of the term "medical" encompasses psychologists and social workers. I would suggest that the arguments the authors make are more pertinent to doctors and possibly nurses than to psychologists for reasons which I hope to explain further on, and that rather than a medical dilemma, the tortured patient poses an ethical dilemma. Contributions like this keep the torture discourse current. Although not its overall purpose, it reminds us that we cannot keep professions segregated from the murkier complexities of politics. In that liminal space between postmodernism and whatever comes next, politics is, or certainly should be, everyone's business.