Medical Insanity East And West

I guess it’s slice and dice day in the Blogosphere. In a post titled, “Remember When Medicine Was About Healing?”, Orrin Judd links to this story in Australia’s Age:

Two Australian philosophers believe surgeons should be allowed to cut off the healthy limbs of some “amputee wannabes”.

Neil Levy and Tim Bayne argue that patients obsessed with having a limb amputated should be able to have it safely removed by a surgeon, as long as they are deemed sane.

“As long as no other effective treatment for their disorder is available, surgeons ought to be allowed to accede to their requests,” the pair wrote in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson looks at surgery of a different sort:

Shari