The suggestion that obesity is a preventable disease has been weighing heavily on my mind ever since I read a recent article in the Hastings Center Report. The article claims to focus on “ethical, policy, and public health concerns” related to anti-obesity medications, but there is a strong undercurrent of bias throughout. As an endocrinologist who specializes in medical weight management, my clinical experience informs my understanding that obesity is almost never entirely preventable, but bias against those with obesity certainly is.

Patients who are members of marginalized groups—women, Black people, trans people, elderly people, disabled people—are often dismissed, minimized, or altogether ignored by health care professionals. Over time, this can lead to gaslighting in which patients question their thoughts, feelings, symptoms, even themselves.

While working as a medical volunteer in the clinic at the edge of the refugee camp, I quickly realized I was in a clinical environment I had never seen before. I was unprepared for the sheer scale of medical needs among the refugees I was there to serve, and for what resource scarcity meant under these conditions.

It seems to me a kind of magical thinking to assume that explaining the genetic causes of obesity will reduce stigma when that new explanation is lodged firmly within a broader project of treating, preventing, or curing fatness. Today, drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and now Zepbound are the favored medical solution.

When I said “yes!” to my partner’s proposal last spring and changed my Facebook relationship status to engaged, I expected targeted advertisements for wedding dresses, flowers, and photographers. What I did not expect were ads to donate my plasma to help pay for my wedding.

Just one month ago, my mom received an intravenous infusion of CAR T-cells, which have become mythical creatures in my imagination.

Florida’s new anti-immigrant law, SB 1718, has escaped widespread notice, despite the way it will undermine the mission—and core identity--of not-for-profit hospitals as caring institutions that promote the health of the community. Bioethics and health care institutions must take action.

In “The Cure for Politicized Pediatric Gender Care,” Moti Gorin argues that a U.S.-based systematic review, conducted by a trusted major medical organization such as the National Institutes of Health or the National Academy of Medicine, is needed to develop consistent standards for pediatric gender care. While the intent behind his call is well-intended, it is based on a flawed premise.

Children and adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria receive radically different treatments depending on where they live. With intense politicization of pediatric gender medicine, the U.S. needs a systematic review of the evidence for different care options.

Our patient, weighing over 600 lbs., was above the weight limit of our hospital system’s scanner tables and those of all the other major medical centers that we called in our large city. What to do next? Our radiology department’s answer was, “Well, there’s always the zoo.”

Billionaire Mark Cuban and physician Alex Oshmyansky recently launched the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company (MCCPDC), an online pharmacy that sells generic prescription medicines at significantly lower prices than other sources. But the acclaim for the pharmacy may eclipse attention to the longstanding structural problems of the pharmaceutical industry and MCCPDC’s role in it.

DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, has been with us for 10 years. Granting a work permit and a renewable two-year stay of deportation to undocumented youth who have grown up in the United States turned out to have enormous benefits for them and for our nation.

Like the pandemic, uncertainty, growing confidence, and the return of doubt come in waves. The Omicron variant is just the latest twist in this plot.

The pandemic has laid bare the significant shortcomings of a health system rooted in an unsustainable financial model that exploits the physical and emotional labor of its nurses.

The moral justification for mandating covid vaccination for health care workers is clear. But what happens if some health care workers still refuse to be vaccinated, and there aren't enough vaccinated staff to care for all the patients in a hospital?

Millions of patients are discharged from hospitals each year, but the individual and systemic forces that shape discharge planning and care transitions frequently lead to “failures that compromise patient health and well-being.”

The practice of informed consent in clinical medicine is broken. Globally, the process varies widely, and even in the United States informed consent looks little like the formal, legal, autonomy-based...

Around the world, an alarming percentage of Covid-19 deaths occurred in long-term care facilities. Some of these deaths may have been avoided by changes in design. It's time that bioethicists to take a closer look at the built health care environment.

Concerns about the health status of sitting presidents of the United States can raise significant questions in medical ethics, notably regarding the scope of a president’s right to confidentiality and of the public’s need—or right—to know about the president’s health, the role and responsibilities of the president’s physician, and the appropriateness of offering unapproved treatments. These concerns are heightened during the global pandemic for which there is no cure or vaccine and limited information about treatments.

The Food and Drug Administration's rigorous guidance for an emergency use authorization of a Covid vaccine was met by resistance from the White House, since some of the terms would make it virtually impossible to issue a vaccine-related emergency authorization before Election Day. Understanding the ethical dimensions of issuing it for a vaccine can provide clarity on the necessity of the FDA’s stringent guidelines.

This year’s Intersex Awareness Day, October 26, marks a historic pivot. Last week, Boston Children’s Hospital revealed that its physicians would no longer perform certain nonconsensual infant genital surgeries on babies born with atypical genitals. They join the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, which made a similar announcement in July and even apologized to its former intersex patients. Intersex advocates have been working toward this goal for decades.

How could I, the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors, be obligated to provide not just satisfactory, but exceptional care to such a morally repugnant character?

Years before George Floyd begged to be released from under the knee of Officer Derek Chauvin, Barbara Dawson, a 57-year-old Black woman, died begging a police officer, John Tadlock, not to remove her oxygen mask. Her death occurred right outside the Calhoun Liberty Hospital in Blountstown, Florida, shortly before Christmas in 2015.

As multiple Covid vaccine candidates enter clinical trials and hopefully move closer to approval, one important unanswered question is how to compensate the rare cases of serious vaccine harm.

Covid isn’t merely overshadowing the drug overdose crisis—it’s directly worsening it.

In his recent JAMA article, Donald Berwick eloquently describes what he termed the “moral determinants of health,” by which he meant a strong sense of social solidarity in which people in the United States would “depend on each other for securing the basic circumstances of healthy lives,” reflecting a “moral law within.” Berwick’s work should serve as a call to action for bioethicists and clinical ethicists to consider what they can do to be forces of broad moral change in their institutions.

The United States leads the world in coronavirus cases and deaths. Although many people have called out the inadequacies of our health care system, Covid-19 has exposed the most significant shortcomings. The need for change can no longer be ignored. Here are three lessons from this pandemic that should be leveraged for change.

The rewards of social distancing are beginning to accrue in former hotspots such as Seattle, the New York metropolitan area, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where the number of new Covid-19 cases requiring hospitalization is declining. Assuming the rewards hold in the face of pressures to reopen the economy, hospitals will now face challenges of reopening their own nonpandemic services for patients whose elective surgeries and other procedures were postponed. Which patients should get priority?

Hospitals in the United States are losing money taking care of patients with Covid-19. The pandemic casts a harsh spotlight on the misallocation of health care resources in the U.S.

The Covid-19 pandemic has imposed tremendous risk on doctors, nurses, and other health care workers not seen in a century. It is time to reconsider prioritization of health care workers’ access to scare critical resources. Historically, for multiple reasons, health care workers have not been prioritized for access to medical care during a pandemic. However, given the unprecedented circumstances surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, it is justifiable to prioritize health care workers when all else is equal between two patients.

As Covid-19 continues to spread throughout the United States, doctors, nurses, and oth-er clinicians are facing unmistakable tragedies. But something less perceptible is afoot. Empathy in medicine is under siege.

The Covid-19 outbreak has forced health care providers, administrative officials, and the general public to each play their part in doing no harm to others. It may come as a surprise to many people, but health care workers may unknowingly spread Covid-19 in their communities simply by wearing scrubs in public.

Previously-stated DNR status would seem irrelevant to ventilator allocation, and yet some existing and proposed guidelines for triage during a public health emergency list DNR status in the list of criteria for excluding patients from getting ventilators or other life-saving health care. This approach is in direct opposition to the generally agreed-upon goal of maximizing the number of survivors, and could result in confusion and public mistrust of the health care system.

This week, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights resolved one of many civil rights complaints alleging discrimination on the basis of disability–the first instance of federal intervention to enforce civil rights laws in rationing protocols since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis. But more work is needed to protect patients with disabilities in the allocation of scarce medical resources.

As a 71-year-old bioethicist, I consider rationing mechanical ventilation based on age to be one morally relevant criterion during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The views of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law on ventilator-dependent chronic care patients evolved over the years. Here's how, and why.

There is a lack of clarity about the New York State Task Force guidelines on ventilator allocation. I believe disability rights concerns regarding the recommendations on chronic ventilator users are well-founded. This lack of clarity may cost lives.

I am a member of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law and helped write its 2015 guidelines on the allocation of ventilators during a public health emergency. The position outlined by the Task Force report has been a point of confusion in the media. I don't believe that the Task Force recommendations discriminate against people with disabilities.

One-third of all new GoFundMe campaigns in the United States are for COVID-19-related needs. This shows where we have failed as a society. It is a makeshift response to institutional failures and not a fair or sustainable solution to crises.

The theme of National Eating Disorder Awareness (NEDA) week , “Come as you are: Hindsight is 20-20,” is designed to encourage those recovering from eating disorders to reflect on their journeys towards body acceptance. It also affords doctors and other health professionals an opportunity to evaluate how well they are doing to help patients reach this goal.

Tinslee Lewis, a critically ill 1-year-old girl born with a rare heart defect and severe lung disease, has spent her entire life in the intensive care unit at Cook Children’s Hospital in Texas and undergone multiple surgeries in attempts to save her life. Tinslee’s care team has determined that she has no chance for any meaningful survival and that ongoing intensive care is harmful and causing her undue suffering. They recommend withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, against the parent’s wishes. Tinslee’s fate is being debated in court.

There is big money in using technology to find information in patient and medical staff data. Companies are rushing to cash in. The Food and Drug Administration has approved more than 40 artificial intelligence-based products for use in medicine. Tens of thousands of medical phone apps are tracking patients and gathering detailed medical information about them. These new technologies bring new ethical questions that health care organizations are poorly equipped to answer.

Health care in America is at a critical juncture. The number of people who need it continues to grow and costs have skyrocketed. But instead of being a beacon of healing, many health care organizations are beleaguered and overwhelmed. Burnout has become a rallying cry for nurses and doctors because it impedes their ability to uphold the foundational values of their professions and to serve in accordance with them. These realities have eroded the fundamental humanity of health care.

The Kings County Medical Society in New York recently hosted a brunch with New York State legislators. One of the guests was Richard Gottfried, chair of the New York State Assembly Health Committee, who is cosponsoring A2694, a bill legalizing medical aid in dying (MAID). As a medical oncologist with 30 years’ experience treating seriously ill patients, I have concerns about it, and I expressed them to Gottfried.

Are we ethically obliged to eat less meat? Bioethicists consider that question, and their role in addressing it.

Amazon.com made waves in health care when it announced that its Alexa Skills Kit, a suite of tools for building voice programs, would be HIPAA compliant. Using the Alexa Skills Kit, companies could build voice experiences for Amazon Echo devices that communicate personal health information with patients. Alexa’s various roles in health care stand to confuse (or potentially exploit) users.

Many survivors of sexual assault are not receiving the justice they deserve. For one thing, an estimated hundreds of thousands of rape kits are left unused, reducing the odds that the perpetrators will be identified and prosecuted. When rape kits are used, many survivors are flooded with bills, in some cases for many years. This system is unethical and illegal.

The U.S. government is using dental scans to determine if migrant youths are over age 18. The scans are inaccurate for this purpose, and yet they determine if children are sent to adult detention centers.

As the opioid crisis reaches a fever pitch, public perception often lumps chronic pain patients and opioid abusers under the stigma-tainted umbrella of drug user. But the full picture of human interaction with pain, pain management, and addiction is far from black and white. In its most recent narrative symposium, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics published personal stories from those living with chronic pain or opioid abuse disorder. Both groups comment on their need for medical treatment and ethical care.

Should religion play a role in a doctor's care of seriously ill patients? The author, a hematologist/oncologist who teaches Jewish medical ethics, writes: "A physician's outlook may be shaped by religious standards without having to impose it on the patient."

“Improving patient experience” has become the mantra of many health care facilities in a highly competitive and regulated environment. But just what is it about the patient experience that needs...

The introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) as a means of preventing HIV infections in those at high risk marked a significant step in the fight against the virus. PrEP involves...

In the wake of the recent Twitter fight between the National Rifle Association and U.S. physician groups over whether doctors should speak out about firearm policy issues, we argue that...

I started writing this on my way back to New York from the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, held in Hong Kong November 27 to 29, where the...

Across the country, billboards are popping up suggesting that vaccines can kill children, when the science behind vaccination is crystal clear – vaccinations are extremely safe. Researchers who study the beliefs of anti-vaxxers have found many...

When people ask me what kind of medicine I practice, I most often say family medicine. Now, however, I am also apt to say I practice “democratic medicine.” What is...

In 2012, I coauthored a case report about the successful use of dietary supplements in treating a case of male infertility in the American Family Physician. Before it was published,...

Last March, 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos were lost at University Hospitals Fertility Center in Cleveland when the temperature in cryogenic tanks spiked due to human error. Officials at University...

Last month, England announced that it would allow women to take the second pill required for a medical abortion–misoprostol–at home, rather than requiring them to travel to a clinic. The...

A long-anticipated policy change proposed by the Trump administration that would count the use of many federally-subsidized programs against immigrants currently eligible to use them threatens public health and would...

Earlier this month, The Seattle Times published an op-ed by Samuel Browd, medical director of Seattle Children’s Sport Concussion Program, on the risks of brain injury in youth sports. Dr. Browd...

Twice upon a time, there was a girl who died. The death certificate that New Jersey issued to 17-year-old Jahi McMath on June 22 was the second one issued for...

Addyi, a drug that made a splash when it was approved in the summer of 2015 as the first “female Viagra,” is back. Its rise, fall, and rise again is...

Reports that migrant children held by the Office of Refugee Resettlement are being drugged require an immediate and unambiguous response by the Trump administration. According to court filings, the drugs that...

It’s a little-known and rarely discussed fact of medical practice that doctors value the ability to love our patients. If the thought of doctors loving patients makes you queasy, be...

In April, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it would criminally prosecute migrants who had been apprehended after crossing the U.S.-Mexico. border. An immediate consequence of this announcement, explained in...

At a time when facts are distorted, disregarded, and ignored in policy making and political discourse, the need in Washington for seekers and defenders of truth has perhaps never been...

I usually have trouble finding a good word to say for President Trump’s policy ventures, but his aim to better control out-of-pocket drug costs is worth support. Distressingly, but unsurprisingly,...

The process is fairly simple. You select one of the companies that offer direct-to-consumer genetic tests; pay online; receive a neatly packed kit that contains a tube designed to collect...

In “Tackling Obesity and Disease: The Culprit Is Sugar; the Response is Legal Regulation,” published in the Hastings Center Report, Lawrence O. Gostin describes four coordinated interventions that have been...

Many privileges come with having a doctor in the family: appointments squeezed into busy schedules as personal favors, a conspicuous lack of financial strain, an ability to comprehend both treatment...

The death of former first lady Barbara Bush at age 92 was noteworthy in many ways. She was by all accounts smart, sharp and funny, and a fine, helpful wife...

While the U.S. system of organ donation and transplantation is in a state of growth for the fifth year in a row, the call for new strategies to accelerate that...

In February, Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) published a report that revealed the unsettling relationship between opioid manufacturers and pain advocacy groups. Focusing on five opioid manufacturers, Purdue, Janssen, Depomed, Insys,...

The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a landmark law adopted 50 years ago this summer, has provided a sound and stable legal platform on which to base an effective nationwide organ...

“It was like he thought we were dirt.” This is how Jahi McMath’s grandmother, Sandra, describes having been treated by one of the doctors at the Oakland’s Children Hospital ICU....

An article in the Hastings Center Report asks whether it is ethical to ration health care by inconvenience and red tape. In other words, given that all societies must ration...

In a recent essay in Vogue the actress, writer, and director Lena Dunham described her decision to have a hysterectomy at age 31 after a decade of unsuccessful attempts to...

An opinion piece in the New York Times, “Doctors Fail Women Who Don’t Want Children,” serves as a striking reminder that the more things seem to change, the more they...

A transgender woman has successfully breastfed a baby. This case has been hailed as a “breakthrough” for transgender families. I will argue that being transgender is only peripherally relevant, and...

“It felt selfish to put my baby at serious risk by pursuing a vaginal birth,” writes Kristen Terlizzi in a collection of essays published recently in Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics....

Hurricane Harvey dissipated in September, but much of the destruction that it wreaked on Texas and Louisiana remains. When addressing residential concerns, disaster relief officials prioritize the newly homeless over...

It’s one o’clock in the morning in the pediatric intensive care unit.  A 16-year-old patient tells his nurse that he disagrees with the medical treatment plan that was agreed to...

As modern medicine improves survival odds, many young cancer patients are living long lives that bear the markings of the disease and its treatment. The side effects of chemotherapy, radiation,...

The arrest of Jumana Nagarwala and her colleagues, in what has become the first case to be tried under the federal law prohibiting female genital mutilation, has brought female genital...

Do the recipients of organ transplants have a right to know if the organs they are about to receive were part of a research study? If so, are the recipients...

Along with the recent public debates over  Confederate memorials, there have been calls to remove or modify the statue of Dr. J. Marion Sims, called the father of gynecology in...

An  article in the New England Journal of Medicine last March warned of the “chilling effect” of recent federal immigration policy changes on health care access for undocumented immigrants. The...

My  colleague Susan Reverby surely got this right: It is time to consider anew what to do about Dr. J. Marion Sims, that is, what to do about the New...

The magnitude of the opioid epidemic is increasing across North America, stretching its harmful reach across socioeconomic borders. Drug overdoses are currently the number one killer of Americans under the...

The case of Charlie Gard continued to unfold this week as Charlie’s parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, withdrew their appeal for permission to bring him to the United States...

In 1971, the United Nations passed a resolution prohibiting its member nations from advertising psychotropic drugs to the general public. More than 40 years later, this resolution has done little...

Three years ago, a small pharmaceutical company with a big agenda created a fake feminist group so that they could get a bad drug approved by the Food and Drug...

On May 4, 2017, just over one month after abandoning a previous version of the bill, the U.S. House of Representatives voted by a 217-213 margin (with one abstention) to...

In 2008, The President’s Council on Bioethics turned to Immanuel Kant and his deontological philosophy as a resource for deliberations on contemporary bioethical issues.  The report focused on Kant’s understanding...

People value their health. It allows them to pursue their aims and enjoy their lives, and it contributes to their well-being. But health is not only good for particular healthy...

Given the chance, would Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch vote to overturn Roe v Wade? Challenge state "death with dignity" laws?

Imagine you are a doctor running a clinic in a primarily lower-income neighborhood, where many of your patients are recent immigrants from different parts of the world. You are granted...

On February 21, the Department of Homeland Security released new policies prioritizing deportation of undocumented immigrants. Will this policy shift affect health care access for this population of 11 million?...

On December 13th, President Obama signed the 21st Century Cures Act, a bipartisan, multidimensional health research and development bill.  The act allocates $4.8 billion to the National Institutes of Health...

Health care access is local; creating, financing, expanding, or restricting health care access for a low-income population involves local, state, and federal policies. During the Obama administration, health insurance for the...

The recent report by the National Center for Health Statistics showing a decline in life expectancy in the U.S. in 2015 highlights a point largely overlooked in post-election discussions about...

Academic bioethics has never been popular with Republicans. Libertarians dislike academic bioethics because it seems too elitist and anti-free market.  Religious thinkers worry it is technocratic, soulless and crassly utilitarian....

Telemedicine is becoming more widespread. This is care at a distance, where patient and clinician are connected by information technology that may include video, audio, and monitoring equipment linked by...

On September 21, Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan, took heat at a Congressional hearing about high EpiPen prices. EpiPens are definitely overpriced – but they are also overprescribed. An EpiPen is...

Drug spending in the United States increased more than 12 percent in 2014 and is projected to rise faster than overall health care spending over the next 10 years. Between...

High drug prices are a fact of modern American life. They are not, however, equally high for all Americans. Their magnitude depends on whether you are un-, under-, or adequately...

Perhaps we were naïve. Our plan was relatively simple: we would chart the legislative evolution of programs for veterans with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) to identify policy gaps for this...

Much of the conversation about conscience in health care has focused on the ethics of physician refusal to perform procedures that they object to. However, this framework seems insufficient for...

As President Barack Obama’s term comes to a conclusion, various initiatives started under his administration remain unfinished.  One of these, the adoption of the recommendations of the Defense Health Board...

When the Tribeca Film Festival canceled its controversial screening of Vaxxed, a “documentary” (with scare-quotes) alleging a Centers for Disease Control cover-up of the debunked vaccine-autism link, it vindicated what scientists have collectively been saying...

Sometime around my mid-50’s I began to ask myself a question: how long should I want to live? My father had died at 64, my mother at 85, my various...

Canada is on track to enact one of the most permissive assisted dying legislations in the world, comparable with laws in the Netherlands and Belgium. On February 25, the Special...

Should people suffering from psychiatric conditions, such as severe, prolonged depression, that have not responded to treatment, be eligible for physician-assisted death? Most jurisdictions that allow PAD do not permit...

At the end of an otherwise quiet night, we were paged to the emergency department for a stat trauma. A man with multiple gunshot wounds was wheeled by paramedics into...

Last month, the New York Times reported that the price of a 62-year old little-known drug, Daraprim (pyrimethamine), rose overnight from $18 to $750 a pill. About 100 pills are needed to treat...

Three weeks ago, my dear friend Jackie, a internationally recognized bioethicist in her fifties who lives in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, went to bed with what she thought was a bad case of...

I had just turned 5 in November 1994 when my fellow Californians voted to pass Proposition 187 in a draconian attempt to restrict undocumented immigrants from receiving health care, education, and other...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) relies on three primary strategies for expanding health insurance coverage. First, it regulates the insurance market to prevent practices that made it difficult or...

Decades of experiments have shown that rats are smart individuals that feel pain and pleasure, care about one another, can read others’ emotions, and will help unfamiliar rats even at a cost...

I was only there to learn how to place IV lines. But as my anesthesia attending and I gathered our needles, tourniquet, and gauze, I noticed that our patient, whom...

On April 1, a $1 billion lawsuit was filed by three law firms based in the United States and Venezuela against Johns Hopkins University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Bristol-Myers Squibb on...

Branded as “The Little Pink Pill” and “Female Viagra,” flibanserin, Sprout Pharmaceuticals’ only drug, was recently resubmitted to the Food and Drug Administration for approval for hypoactive sexual desire disorder...

I would guess that most Americans, even Jewish Americans, had never heard of metzitzah b’peh until the recent controversy between ultra-Orthodox Jews and the New York City Department of Health....

This week the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released a brief, Ethics and Ebola: Public Health Planning and Response,to the administration and the public on ethical preparedness for...

After having been virtually eliminated in the United States in the year 2000, measles have made a comeback, with nearly 150 cases in 17 states and nearly 30 confirmed cases of the...

The current measles outbreak has brought public attention to the ease with which vaccine exemptions are available. As the media continually inform us, 48 states allow for religious exemptions, while...

When she was 18, Carmen Guadalupe Vasquez Aldana was sentenced to 30 years in jail. Her crime was delivering a stillborn baby. She was suspected of having had an abortion....

Recently it has been argued that cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) should, as a matter of policy, not be offered to persons with Ebola disease. Such a categorical restriction of CPR based...

The Choosing Wisely campaign is one of the most exciting experiments in health care in quite a while. If it lives up to its potential, Choosing Wisely could prevent some of the...

“The capacity for suffering and enjoying things is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in any meaningful...

As health care institutions in the United States prepare for Ebola patients, many have adopted the policy that those providing hands-on care should come from a pool of volunteers. Given...

While details of the deaths of patients in Dallas and Madrid from Ebola are not public, their passing prompts questions about resuscitation in individuals infected with the virus. To date,...

The crisis and failure of caregiving that have engulfed the Veterans Health Administration cannot be solved with increased resources or even by hiring more doctors and nurses. Additional resources are...

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., et al., could undermine a central goal of the Patient Protection and...

I was born in the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital in 1974 where the Tuskegee Syphilis Study took place. I have had a lifelong curiosity about the ethics of the study and...

The director of the medical intensive care unit did not like the idea of having a bioethicist around. But she agreed to the request, and there he was on rounds,...

Several weeks ago, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) announced a new rule banning corporate logos from accredited educational materials for physicians. The ACCME sets standards for the...

The American health care industry is undergoing a transformation in several respects, including the substantial integration and consolidation of health care providers. Three of the leading ways in which this...

It is hard to quibble with the fact that Dr. Daniel Mascarenhas is breaking the law. It is also hard to quibble with the fact that he is a hero. The...

I appreciate Dr. Benatar’s essay on the role of bioethics in confronting the challenges of global health inequities. His article aptly catalogues the contributing factors–both specific to health and otherwise–that weigh heavily...

A new debate is surging through the gay male population in the United States: should gay men take a drug that can reduce their risk of contracting HIV? The drug...

Two cases involving “brain death” have received considerable public attention, including commentary by several well-known bioethicists. In commenting on these cases the bioethicists have stated, in no uncertain terms, that...

Geylang is the red-light district of Singapore, east of the city center. It would be easy, and wrong, to describe Geylang as a different world from the skyscrapers and malls...

Ethicists and others have been concerned that the disclosure of genetic information to patients might have negative consequences. The suspicion has been that negative effects, say, becoming depressed, are particularly...

The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law released its Report and Recommendations for Research with Human Subjects Who Lack Consent Capacity today, which analyzes the ethical and legal implications...

After the Hastings Center Report published my essay on Mayor Bloomberg’s health legacy­ — with its key ideas spread through the popular media (here and here) — vitriolic messages streamed...

Last summer’s revelations that malnourished Aboriginals in Canada served as unwitting and unprotected subjects in nutritional experiments in the 1940s and 1950s brought a sharp reaction–though the research took place...

In the November-December issue of the Hastings Center Report I wrote about voluntary sterilization for childfree women. The article came about through my inability to get sterilized as a childfree woman. I...

In the current issue of the Hastings Center Report, two teams of physicians and ethicists at Penn State consider the ethics of using online research and social networking tools to learn...

Smoking-related illnesses cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars a year in health care expenditures and lost productivity, and claim hundreds of thousands of lives.” Given the enormous...

The salience of the Constitution’s spending clause to the public’s health is not often appreciated–empowering the federal government to “provide for the common Defense and general Welfare.” But the power...

Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine’s recent announcement that it would accept applications from Dreamers – young undocumented immigrants eligible for Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA)status – is an innovative and welcome...

Sport-related concussions are a significant public health problem, and concussion management is one of the most controversial issues in sports medicine. The latest international consensus statement on concussion in sport advises that...

AIDS in New York: The First Five Years is an exhibit running this summer at The New-York Historical Society, an organization so venerable that its name reflects how the city’s name...

Three years before beginning medical school, I got off a bus in Granada, Spain and met the family I would be living with for four months. My host parents, Carmen...

In a recent article in the Hastings Center Report, Daniel Callahan argues that obesity is a serious public health problem facing the U.S. and suggests a variety of strategies for combating this problem....

In a recent article in the Hastings Center Report, Daniel Callahan argues that obesity is a serious public health problem facing the U.S. and suggests a variety of strategies for combating this problem....

Since the 1960s, obesity has become one of the most significant health problems in industrialized nations. In the U.S., the percentage of obese adults increased from 13 percent in the 1960s...

In his article, “Obesity: Chasing an Elusive Epidemic,” published in the Hastings Center Report, Daniel Callahan posits that obesity is so widespread and embedded in our culture that most if not...

Nearly everyone agrees that obesity is a significant public health problem in the United States, and nearly everyone agrees that the public health responses to it so far have been...

The previously obscure ultra-Orthodox Jewish rite of metzitzah b’peh (oral suction) has burst into the news lately and raised critical questions about genital surgery, consent, First Amendment rights, tradition, and...

TEDMED, which took place in Washington last week, was a beehive of doctors, nurses, medical students, leaders of medical institutions and government health agencies, entrepreneurs, engineers, patients, patient advocates, athletes,...

Is there an ethical case to be made for questioning the homespun wisdom, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?” An argument along those lines caught a...

I am still in medical school, but today I sigh the frustrated, disapproving sigh of a fully trained doctor. “You know,” I scold the middle-aged man in front of me,...

Patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state have figured prominently in the law and medical ethics relating to end-of-life decisions since the case of Karen Quinlan in 1976....

The demise of the CLASS (Community Living Assistance Services and Support) Act is the calamitous result of ideological warfare and political cowardice. It would have provided a modest benefit –...

Another landmark right-to-die case hit the U.K. headlines last week. A High Court judge ruled, in W v M & Ors [2011] EWHC 2443 (Fam), that a 52-year- old woman...

Reading Frank Bruni’s recent review in the New York Times of Provocateur, a chic bar in the meatpacking district, got me thinking about an argument I’d had recently with a...

I’d like to say I was shocked when a colleague sent me the warning letter from Eli Lilly relaying results of a French study that indicate a 30 percent increased risk...

It was one of those messages I get occasionally, this time from a man who had suddenly realized we were just a few blocks away from each other. The writer’s...

In my e-mail in-box a few weeks ago, I received a polite message from a woman named Sarah Hoffman who was writing to ask why I was being such a...

I was invited to join the Seattle Growth Attenuation and Ethics Working Group — collective author of the lead article in the current issue of the Hastings Center Report — but...

In “The Rhetoric of Dehumanization: An Analysis of Medical Reports of the Tuskegee Syphilis Project,” Martha Solomon brilliantly demonstrates how the project’s researchers hid their work in plain sight. Specifically,...

If you’re trying to make sense of the “decisions” just made in Miami about sex-typing in sports, and you’re struggling, join the club. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) presumably tasked...

What is medicine for? I found this question on my mind recently, not only because I had been discussing it with a group of thoughtful medical students to whom I...

As a wizened gender rights advocate, I know better than to assume the activists making the most noise are actually representative of “the community” they insist they represent. So, while...

A dwarf walks into a bar. I was searching for a funny anecdote that would begin with that sentence when I ran into Danny Black, a dwarf who has walked...

For years, the abortion of fetuses likely to have disabilities has been called “selective abortion,” but, for reasons made clear in Hilde Lindemann’s thoughtful Bioethics Forumreflection on the matter, the...

Deborah Costandine and I met in June of 2004, but she didn’t send me the autopsy report of her baby for another year and a half. So I didn’t start...

Because I’ve acted as a professional advocate for people born with norm-challenging bodies, quite a number of strangers and familiars have been writing to ask me what I think of...

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that New York City “is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificates even if they have...

As if we didn’t have enough reasons to wish for better informed consent practices in the United States, here’s another: evidence that, if physicians spent more time seeking truly informed...

When I was a student, I loved to read Freud and Nietzsche and Marx. I was into what the great French philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Sex,...

So, a new randomized control trial comes out showing that circumcision in adult males can dramatically reduce HIV infection rates, and all my friends who opted for circumcising their baby...