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The badness of death and priorities in health

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Medical Ethics, April 2016
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  • In the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (89th percentile)
  • Good Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (75th percentile)

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1 blog
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3 Facebook pages

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17 Dimensions

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Title
The badness of death and priorities in health
Published in
BMC Medical Ethics, April 2016
DOI 10.1186/s12910-016-0104-6
Pubmed ID
Authors

Carl Tollef Solberg, Espen Gamlund

Abstract

The state of the world is one with scarce medical resources where longevity is not equally distributed. Given such facts, setting priorities in health entails making difficult yet unavoidable decisions about which lives to save. The business of saving lives works on the assumption that longevity is valuable and that an early death is worse than a late death. There is a vast literature on health priorities and badness of death, separately. Surprisingly, there has been little cross-fertilisation between the academic fields of priority setting and badness of death. Our aim is to connect philosophical discussions on the badness of death to contemporary debates in health priorities. Two questions regarding death are especially relevant to health priorities. The first question is why death is bad. Death is clearly bad for others, such as family, friends and society. Many philosophers also argue that death can be bad for those who die. This distinction is important for health priorities, because it concerns our fundamental reasons for saving lives. The second question is, 'When is the worst time to die?' A premature death is commonly considered worse than a late death. Thus, the number of good life years lost seems to matter to the badness of death. Concerning young individuals, some think the death of infants is worse than the death of adolescents, while others have contrary intuitions. Our claim is that to prioritise between age groups, we must consider the question of when it is worst to die. Deprivationism provides a more plausible approach to health priorities than Epicureanism. If Deprivationism is accepted, we will have a firmer basis for claiming that individuals, in addition to having a health loss caused by morbidity, will have a loss of good life years due to mortality. Additionally, Deprivationism highlights the importance of age and values for health priorities. Regarding age, both variants of Deprivationism imply that stillbirths are included in the Global Burden of Disease. Finally, we suggest that the Time-Relative Interest Account may serve as an alternative to the discounting and age weighting previously applied in the Global Burden of Disease.

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X Demographics

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Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 34 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 34 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Doctoral Student 5 15%
Researcher 5 15%
Other 4 12%
Student > Master 3 9%
Student > Bachelor 2 6%
Other 2 6%
Unknown 13 38%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Medicine and Dentistry 10 29%
Social Sciences 5 15%
Nursing and Health Professions 3 9%
Philosophy 1 3%
Business, Management and Accounting 1 3%
Other 0 0%
Unknown 14 41%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 18. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 25 May 2016.
All research outputs
#1,754,653
of 23,577,654 outputs
Outputs from BMC Medical Ethics
#164
of 1,016 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#30,333
of 302,301 outputs
Outputs of similar age from BMC Medical Ethics
#4
of 16 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 23,577,654 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 92nd percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,016 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 14.8. This one has done well, scoring higher than 83% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 302,301 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 89% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 16 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 75% of its contemporaries.