Profile

Phoebe Friesen is an assistant professor, a philosopher and medical ethicist, working within the Biomedical Ethics Unit and the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University. Her work engages with ethical and epistemic issues related to the production and implementation of knowledge in the health sciences, drawing on feminist philosophy of science, ethics scholarship, and methodologies from the social sciences.  She has written about the harms of failing to acknowledge the impact of the placebo effect in both research and clinical contexts, the issue of inconsistency within and across research ethics boards, the role of responsibility in the allocation of health care resources, the promises and challenges related to participatory research, and the importance of requiring consent for educational pelvic examinations on women under anesthetic.

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