- Bioethics Forum Essay
Beyond “Just Sign Here”–A New Model of Consent for Primary Care
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 process presented in textbooks, journal articles, and academic lectures.Read the Post Advancing Social Justice, Health Equity, and Community
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The Bioethics of Built Health Care Spaces
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The Ethics of Treating the President
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayConcerns 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.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Scholar on How Some Countries Control Health Spending
Read the PostHastings Center NewsAlthough the U.S. has the highest health care prices in the world, the specific mechanisms commonly used by other countries to set and update prices are often overlooked, with a tendency to favor strategies such as reducing the use of fee-for-service reimbursement. Many U.S. health policymakers reco...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Can AI Reduce Inequity and Improve Empathy in Medicine? A Conversation Between Eric Topol and Mildred Solomon
Read the PostHastings Center NewsArtificial intelligence has the potential to reduce inequities in health care and even help restore empathy to the doctor-patient relationship—if, and only if, key ethical barriers are addressed and opportunities grasped. That was Eric Topol’s overarching message at The Hastings Center’s 50th ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethics of Emergency Use Authorization During the Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
New Project: Building an Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health Care
Read the PostHastings Center NewsBig Data in health care is growing, and it is coming from an increasing number of sources, including electronic health records, patient monitors and physical activity trackers, and smartphone applications. How accurate is this data? What biases does it contain? How do errors and biases ultimately af...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
A Historic Intersex Awareness Day
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis 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.Read the Post Building an Ethics Framework for Biomedical Data Modeling
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Caring for My First Neo-Nazi Patient
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Fox, Bosk, and Rothman: An Appreciation of Three Scholars of Medicine
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWith all of the tumult surrounding the coronavirus and the upcoming presidential election, few people likely noticed that three important figures in bioethics, medical history, and medical sociology recently died within a month of one another. But for those of us who work in these fields, the deaths...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Black Women Can’t Breathe
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayYears 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Fair Compensation for Rare Vaccine Harms
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We Can’t Forget the Nation’s Other Epidemic
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Ethicists as a Force for Institutional Change and Policies to Promote Equality
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Cracks in the System: Lessons Learned from the Covid-19 Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
After the Surge: Prioritizing the Backlog of Delayed Hospital Procedures
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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?Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Lessons from Covid-19: Why Treating Sick Patients is Bad Business for Hospitals
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Why Health Care Workers Should Receive Priority Care for Covid-19
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Sustaining Clinical Empathy During the Pandemic
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The Covid Threat No One Is Talking About: Wearing Scrubs in Public
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Denying Ventilators to Covid-19 Patients with Prior DNR Orders is Unethical
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPreviously-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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
When It Comes to Rationing, Disability Rights Law Prohibits More than Prejudice
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Why I Support Age-Related Rationing of Ventilators for Covid-19 Patients
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New York State Task Force on Life and the Law Ventilator Allocation Guidelines: How Our Views on Disability Evolved
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Do New York State’s Ventilator Allocation Guidelines Place Chronic Ventilator Users at Risk? Clarification Needed
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Disabusing the Disability Critique of the New York State Task Force Report on Ventilator Allocation
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Crowdfunding for Covid-Related Needs: Unfair and Inadequate
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We Need International Medical Graduates to Help Fight Covid-19. Immigration Policies Keep Them Away
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs the U.S. health care system faces the strain of responding to the coronavirus pandemic, critical services are being provided by international medical graduates, who, in the years and months leading up to this crisis, have found their capacity to contribute limited by increasingly restrictive immi...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
America’s Bioethicists and Health Care Leaders: Government Must Use Federal Powers To Fight COVID-19
Read the PostHastings Center NewsNearly 1,400 of the nation’s most prominent bioethicists and health leaders signed an urgent letter to Congress and the White House, imploring the U.S. government to immediately use its federal power and funds to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic as a matter of moral imperative. The petition was developed by Mildred Solomon, president of The Hastings Center, and Lawrence Gostin, a Hastings Fellow and director of the O’Neill Center for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
The Hastings Center Produces Guidance for Ethical Practice in Responding to COVID-19
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe Hastings Center has developed a resource for health care institutions and institutional ethics services to support leadership and practice during the novel coronavirus public health emergency and in the care of patients with COVID-19.The Hastings Center convened an expert advisory group to meet the need for a practical resource to support institutional preparedness and supplement public health and clinical practice guidance on COVID-19.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Coronavirus Response Is Insufficient for Vulnerable New Yorkers
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Health Care for Obesity and Eating Disorders: What Needs to Change
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Deciding When Enough is Enough in Providing Life-Sustaining Treatment for a Child
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayTinslee 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Why Health Care Organizations Need Technology Ethics Committees
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThere 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.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Rice Family Fellow Founds New Journal on Disability
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To Restore Humanity in Health Care, Address Clinician Burnout
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayHealth 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.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Expert in Artificial Intelligence Named Hastings Center Senior Advisor
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Hastings Center Scholars Respond to Prison Sentence of Researcher Who Created First Gene-Edited Babies
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe Compassionate Use Advisory Committee, headed by Hastings Center Fellow Arthur Caplan, of NYU Langone, received the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the Food and Drug Administration’s Innovation Award. The committee was recognized for transforming how expanded access requests, also known as compassionate use requests, are granted by drug developers.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Helping Seriously Ill Patients Access “Last Resort” Medicines
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe Compassionate Use Advisory Committee, headed by Hastings Center Fellow Arthur Caplan, of NYU Langone, received the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the Food and Drug Administration’s Innovation Award. The committee was recognized for transforming how expanded access requests, also known as compassionate use requests, are granted by drug developers.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
What Is Ethical Eating in the Age of Climate Change?
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What’s Next for an Aging America: Palliative Care Leaders Assess the Future
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe Collaborative for Palliative Care, in partnership with The Hastings Center, University of Rochester Finger Lakes Geriatrics Education Center (FLGEC), and Calvary Hospital, will host its annual conference this December 11th at Iona College, New Rochelle, N.Y., titled The Next Generation of Palliative Care: Integrating Palliative and Social Ethics of Care.”Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Addressing Structural Injustice: A Call to Action for Bioethics
Read the PostHastings Center NewsTremendous wealth beside abject poverty, a widening income gap, the vast disparity between the life prospects of a black child and a white child -- structural injustices are pervasive in our country and many places in the world. What does bioethics have to say about these problems? The Hastings Center has committed to intensifying it efforts to address structural injustices. Ideas for doing so emerged in a plenary session organized by Hastings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
New Project Seeks to Build Diverse Participation in Precision Medicine Research
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe Hastings Center is co-leading a new project to examine recruitment and retention of participants the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, an unprecedented initiative to collect genetic and other health-related data from at least one million people living in the United States. This project will focus on a research site that is a health center that serves primarily Latino and African American patients -- groups historically underrepresented in research – to identify strategies to build engagement.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Award-Winning Essay: How Can Mobile Apps Improve Clinical Trials and Safeguard Participants?
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Diving Deeper into Amazon Alexa’s HIPAA Compliance
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAmazon.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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Justice for Survivors of Sexual Assault
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayMany 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.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Center’s Rosemary Gibson Honored for Enhancing Health Care Quality
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The Public Charge Rule Is a Eugenic Policy
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLast week, the Department of Homeland Security announced the final public charge rule, which revises the interpretation of “public charge” in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Under the Final Rule, DHS may find applicants ineligible for a visa for admission to the U.S. or a green card grant...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Does Genetic Testing Pose Psychosocial Risks?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsFor the last quarter century, researchers have been asking whether genetic information might have negative psychosocial effects. Anxiety, depression, disrupted relationships, and heightened stigmatization have all been posited as possible outcomes—but not consistently found. What accounts for the ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
It’s Unethical to Use Dental X-Rays to Send Migrant Children to Adult Detention Facilities
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Hastings President Addresses the Question: Is Ethical AI an Oxymoron?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsAs artificial intelligence transforms health care, what should be done to assure that it brings about improvements and greater equity? To address those questions, Hastings Center President Mildred Solomon joined a panel at the Aspen Ideas: Health Festival called “Ethical Artificial Intelligence: Oxymoron or Possibility?”Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Living with Pain and Opioid Addiction: Bioethics Narratives
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Dementia and the Ethics of Choosing When to Die
Read the PostHastings Center NewsAs the American population ages and dementia is on the rise, The Hastings Center is embarking on pathbreaking research to explore foundational questions associated with the dementia trajectory and the concerns of persons facing this terminal condition. This new research is made possible by a major g...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Religion, Suffering, and the Physician’s Role
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New York City Initiative to Cover the Uninsured Reflects Hastings Research, Recommendations
Read the PostHastings Center NewsOn May 7, New York City officials unveiled details of NYC Care, a new program in the nation’s largest public health system that aims to improve health care access for about 300,000 low-income New Yorkers who are ineligible for insurance because of their immigration status. The initiative, ann...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Genomics Enters the Clinic: What Should Savvy Consumers Know?
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Should Patients Be Considered Consumers? Hastings Scholars Say, No.
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThere is broad support for building health care systems that are patient centered, seen as a means of improving health outcomes and as morally worthy in itself. But the concept of patient-centered care has increasingly merged with the concept of patients as consumers, which “is conceptually confuse...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
What Dr. Seuss Saw at the Golden Years Clinic
Read the PostBioethics Forum Essay“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 to be improved? Will better food and gift bags do the trick? Or are more basic changes required?Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Prevention Optimism: Does It Raise Ethical Questions about PrEP for HIV?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 taking the HIV medicine Truvada or a generic version daily. It is now gradually becoming available across the world...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Staying in Their Lane: Health Professionals Must Address Gun Violence
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 professionalism actually requires that doctors take a leadership role in gun policy debates, even if (in fact, espe...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
The Hastings Center Celebrates Outstanding Journalists
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThree journalists received The Hastings Center Awards for Excellence in Journalism on Ethics and Reprogenetics. The awards were presented at an event in New York City on December 6 that celebrated the role of journalists in helping the public understand the science of heredity and the power of geneti...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Should We Edit the Human Germline? Is Consensus Possible or Even Desirable?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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 breaking news of the alleged world’s first birth of genetically edited babies loomed large. The surprising news both reinforced and undercut...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Three Ethical Reasons for Vaccinating your Children
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What I Practice: Democratic Medicine
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhen 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 democratic medicine? Less a style than a way of being, it embodies five principles born of democratic values related to history, duty...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Debating Modern Medical Technologies: The Politics of Safety, Effectiveness, and Patient Access
Read the PostHastings Center NewsDoes a new medicine or diagnostic test work? Is it safe? Should the government approve it and insurers pay for it? The answers are not as straightforward as they may seem – and the reasons are the subject of a new book by Karen J. Maschke, a research scholar at The Hastings Center, and Michael K. G...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Let the Sun Shine into the Medical Ivory Tower
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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, I was surprised to receive a communication asking me to disclose the fact that I had written a textbook on dietary supp...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
New Project: Countering the Rising Threats to Immigrant Health
Read the PostHastings Center NewsImmigrants and their families in the United States and migrants who seek asylum in this country face accelerating threats and harms to their health because of the Trump administration’s immigration priorities. A new Hastings Center project, supported by the Open Society Foundations Public Health ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Wrongful Death Suits for Frozen Embryos: A Bad Idea
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLast 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 Hospitals have apologized repeatedly to the affected patients, and say that they are working to provide ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
England’s Abortion Law Catches Up
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLast 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 policy brings England in line with Scotland and Wales, as well as many other countries, and it elimina...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Immigrant Health and the Moral Scandal of the “Public Charge” Rule
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA 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 undermine ethical practice in health professions and systems.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Scholar on Ensuring Evidence-based Prescribing of Off-Label Drugs
Read the PostHastings Center NewsIt is legal and common for physicians to prescribe drugs for uses other than those for which they are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But in a letter in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, Hastings Center research scholar Karen J. Maschke points to the important role ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Newspaper Op-Eds Should Disclose Authors’ Industry Ties
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayEarlier 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 acknowledged troubling research on the dangers of repetitive brain trauma, but also emphasized that mil...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Jahi McMath, Race, and Bioethics
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayTwice 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 her. California issued McMath’s first death certificate in December 2013. McMath had been admitted to Children’s Hospital Oakland on...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Addyi Rises Again
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What Are the Rules for Ethical Medication of Migrant Kids?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayReports 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 are alleged to be among those given to children without their parents’ consent include cl...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Scanning the Landscape of Physician-Assisted Death
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine released Physician- Assisted Death: Scanning the Landscape, proceedings from a two-day workshop convened by the National Academies in February to take a comprehensive look at the current landscape of physician-assisted death in the United S...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Love and Boundaries in Medicine
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIt’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 reassured. I’m not talking about romantic love but the visceral sense of goodwill and impulse to service that draws...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Shocking the Conscience: Justice Department versus the Health of Immigrant Women and Children
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 detail here, is the separation of children from their parents.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Only PhD Scientist in Congress Speaks About Truth, Politics, and Human Flourishing
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAt 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 greater. I discussed the state of affairs with Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois who prides himsel...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Trumping Drug Costs
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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, it does not include giving government the needed power to bargain with industry for what it will pay f...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Addressing Questions About DTC Genetic Tests and Privacy
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 your spit; return the package using prepaid postage; and wait for the results that will unravel the mysteries of ...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Center President Calls for “Moral Leadership” to Improve End-of-Life Care
Read the PostHastings Center NewsAre you, as caregivers in a twenty-first century health system, helping your patients and families to make fully informed decisions about the treatments they want and that are likely to be in their best interest? Or, like so many clinicians working in modern health care systems today, are your pati...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Is it Time to Regulate the Sale of Sugar to Minors?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn “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 effective at controlling peoples’ tobacco consumption and which can serve as a “powerf...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Should Doctors Treat Family Members?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayMany 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 plans and health care systems. But familial and professional roles often clash in a health crisis.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Palliative Care vs. Cancer Research
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 to one president and mother to another. Her death last week after a long illness, with her husband at her side, was a model of palliative care su...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Scholar and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist on Conscientious Objection
Read the PostHastings Center NewsWhen is it acceptable for health care professionals to refuse to provide a treatment because it violates their conscience? The implications of recent developments in federal and state governments that increase protections for conscientious objection were the focus of a panel discussion in New York Ci...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Evaluating Recommendations to Increase Organ Donation
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhile 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 progress has never been more robust as the critical need for transplantable organs continues to far exceed the supply. In an article in the M...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Fentanyl at Your Door: Who are Pain Groups Advocating For?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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, and Mylan, the report found that manufacturers contributed $9 ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Organ Donation and Transplantation in the U.S.: 50 Years of Success, Strategies for Improvement
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 donation and transplantation system, as we discuss in our article in the current issue of the Hastings Center Report. We work...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
“No one was listening to us.” Lessons from the Jahi McMath Case
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Documentary Series Premiere on Genetic Medicine Features Hastings Scholars
Read the PostHastings Center NewsHastings Center president Mildred Z. Solomon and director of research Josephine Johnston were featured speakers at the premiere screening of The Code, a series of three documentaries on the origins of genetic medicine and what its successes and failures mean for the future. The series was produced by...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Being Poor Is a Full-Time Job
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAn 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 health care in one way or another, is it ever ethical to push people away from an unpreferred health care option by making it m...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Lena Dunham’s Lesson for Doctors
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 control increasingly excruciating pain from endometriosis. The decision was difficult because it meant that she would never be ab...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Reproductive Freedom: The More Things Change . . .
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Breastfeeding and Transgender Women
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Natural, Medical, Political Childbirth
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Questions About Conscientious Objection in Health Care
Read the PostHastings Center NewsIn January the Department of Health and Human Services acted to increase enforcement of laws that permit doctors and other health care workers to refuse to provide services such as abortion because of moral or religious objections. A new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in the department’s...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
After Hurricane Harvey, Injustice in Houston
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayHurricane 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 the chronically homeless, choosing to protect the previously privileged over the unp...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Improving Ethics at the Bedside
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIt’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 by his parents. While he is legally a minor, he may have the capacity to make his own medical decisions. He is...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Scholar Addresses Implications of CDC Avoiding Seven Words
Read the PostHastings Center NewsVulnerable. Entitlement. Diversity. Transgender. Fetus. Evidence-based. Science-based. Last week, news outlets reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been advised to avoid using these seven words in budget documents. In an interview with Medscape Hastings Center research sc...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Cancer and Fertility: Learning from Survivors
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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, and surgery often include damage to fertility, such as early menopause or the loss of viable sperm. A recen...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Deadline Extended: Help Us Recognize Physicians for Outstanding End-of-Life Care
Read the PostHastings Center NewsNominations have been extended to January 22, 2018 for The Hastings Center Cunniff-Dixon Physician Awards, which recognize physicians in the United States who give exemplary care to patients nearing the end of life. The awards commend doctors who provide outstanding care at the bedside, serve as mo...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Medicine, Morals, and Female Genital Cutting
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 cutting practices into public conversation once again. Dr. Nagarwala, an emergency medicine physician from a small S...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
How Much Control Should You Have Over Your Biological Data?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsWhen you donate a sample of blood or saliva for research purposes, is it your property? What about the genetic and other data it contains? Should you be allowed to specify the type of research it is used for? These and other ethical questions are at the heart of a new book, Specimen Science: Ethics a...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
When Are Organ Recipients Human Research Subjects?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayDo 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 themselves research subjects? A recent article in the Hastings Center Report maintains that the recipients do have a right to know, but that the...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
A Call for Medical Students to Learn the Full Story about the “Father of Gynecology”
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAlong 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 medical histories, who conducted horrific experiments on enslaved black woman. Removal of the structures alone will not...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Breakthrough Cancer Treatment: Hastings Scholars Discuss Hope and Challenges in Health Affairs
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe first gene therapy for cancer, approved by the Food Drug Administration in August, will transform the treatment of a particular kind of cancer in children and young adults. It’s transformative because it uses a patient’s own immune cells to attack the cancer cells. The hope is that this is ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Being a Good Doctor When Patients Fear Deportation: Lessons for Future Physicians
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAn 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 Trump administration’s expanded immigration enforcement has seen an increased number of arrests at m...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
On Sims’s Legacy: Work for Bioethics
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayMy 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 York City statue that commemorates him, and accordingly, about the medicine, history, and bioethics that have remembered and/or revered him. The works...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Removing the Stigma from “Stigmatopin” to Help Curb Opioid Dependence
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 age of 50. Reports suggest that in the next decade the opioid epidemic could kill more people t...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Charlie Gard, Compassionate Use, and Single-Payer Health Care
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 for experimental treatment. The move came after tests showed that Charlie had sustained irreversible muscle damage, making...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Masked Marketing: Pharmaceutical Company Funding of ADHD Patient Advocacy Groups
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 to halt pharmaceutical companies from marketing stimulants as treatments for attention deficit-hyperactiv...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Score is Even
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThree 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 Administration. The story of how this happened is a case study in how industry affects medical discourse, the subject of a PharmedOut confere...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Helping Transgender Adolescents Make Informed Decisions About Their Reproductive Care
Read the PostHastings Center NewsDanielle is a 15-year-old transgender female who is about to begin hormone therapy. Her parents would like her to explore gamete cryopreservation – sperm freezing – as a means of preserving her fertility, which could be impaired by the hormone treatments. Danielle would prefer not to, remarking, ...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Governance of Emerging Technology Conference Features Hastings Center Experts
Read the PostHastings Center NewsArtificial intelligence, gene editing, synthetic biology – these are among the new technologies discussed at Governance of Emerging Technology 2017, organized by Arizona State University College of Law and cosponsored by The Hastings Center, which took place in Phoenix on May 17 – 19. Hastings Ce...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Robert Wilson Charitable Trust Enables The Hastings Center to Set Priorities for Future Work on Aging
Read the PostHastings Center NewsIt’s unusual for a funder to recognize that large societal problems are best addressed after deep reflection and a deliberate and inclusive process of consultation and priority-setting. “But then,” says Mildred Z. Solomon, president of The Hastings Center, “The Robert Wilson Charitable Trus...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Health Reform and Competing Visions of Justice
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOn 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 adopt the American Health Care Act (AHCA). During the coming weeks and months, most of the political commentary will focus on the s...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Association of Health Care Journalists Meeting Features Hastings Center Experts
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe Hastings Center teamed up with the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) to create three sessions on gene editing for its annual meeting in Orlando on April 20. In addition, Hastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger was a panelist on a session concerning health care for refugees an...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
OrthoKantics
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 of human dignity, and his deduction that the value of a human is intrinsic. The ...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
For Medicare Coverage, What Outcomes Should Count and What Evidence Is Needed?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsWhy doesn’t Medicare pay unconditionally for amyloid PET imaging, a brain scan that identifies whether patients have beta amyloid plaque in their brain tissue, which may be a contributing factor for Alzheimer’s disease? This question is at the heart of current disputes about health technology ass...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
How “America First” Undermines Our Health
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPeople 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 individuals. It is also good for their families, communities, nations, and in a world in which people flows are global, heal...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Neil Gorsuch, Aid in Dying, and Roe v. Wade
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A Doctor’s Dilemma: A Case of Two “Right” Answers
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayImagine 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 a fixed annual budget of $100,000 through your local public health department, and it is unlikely that you can obtai...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
New Homeland Security Rules and Health Care Access for Undocumented Immigrants
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOn 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? Two public health studies from Arizona suggest that immigration crackdowns change health-s...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
What Happens When Undocumented Immigrants Are Seriously Ill?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsHow do state and local health care systems care for seriously ill undocumented immigrants? This question is the focus of a collection of articles in JAMA Internal Medicine. Nancy Berlinger, a Hastings Center research scholar and coauthor of one of the articles, “The Illness Experience of Undocument...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The 21st Century Cures Act Sparks Values Debate
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOn 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 and $500 million to the Food and Drug Administration over the next 10 years for research and ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Health Care Access for Undocumented Immigrants under the Trump Administration
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayHealth 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 estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States remained...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Public Health under the Trump Administration
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 health policy under the Trump Administration. The significant increases in health insurance coverage under t...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
After the Election Bioethics Faces a Rocky Road
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAcademic 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. Now with Trumpism add a populist disdain for expertise, experts and t...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Transgender Medicine Focus of New Publication
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe November issue of the AMA Journal of Ethics is devoted to transgender health and medicine. Contributors include Elizabeth Dietz, a project manager and research assistant at The Hastings Center, who is co-author of “How Should Physicians Refer When Referral Options Are Limited for Transgender Pa...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Mildred Solomon on Controversial Duchenne Drug Approval
Read the PostHastings Center NewsWriting in the Health Affairs Blog, Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon says that the Food and Drug Administration’s controversial decision to approve the first drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy is defensible, but only if there is adequate follow through. Read the post here.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Telemedicine Needs Ethical Guidelines
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayTelemedicine 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 computer. Telemedicine has many advantages. It can bring expert care and support to people in rem...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
EpiPens and the Sale of Fear
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The Challenge of High Drug Prices in the U.S.
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayDrug 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 2007 and 2016, the price of a pair of epinephrine autoinjector EpiPens, used to counter life-threatening allergic reactions, rose...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Why EpiPen Prices Are No Shock
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayHigh 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 insured, and also whether or not you are an insurance company. Insurance companies routinely negotiate for lower-than-list ...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Nancy Berlinger Co-Authors Palliative Care Recommendations
Read the PostHastings Center NewsHastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger is an author of a new policy statement on palliative care issued by the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association. The statement makes recommendations on how to reduce barriers that prevent many patients with heart disease and stroke from ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Lincoln’s Promise: Congress, Veterans, and Traumatic Brain Injury
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPerhaps 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 underserved and vulnerable population. With recent media attention highlighting the U.S. Department of Veteran...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Reframing Conscientious Care: Q&A with Mara Buchbinder
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayMuch 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 thinking about contemporary abortion provision, where new legislation is routinely passed to restrict the a...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
U.S. Military Medical Ethics Guidelines in Limbo
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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 (DHB), “Ethical Guidelines and Practices for U.S. Military Medical Professionals,” is...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Do Documentaries Have to Tell the Truth?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhen 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 for years: There’s nothing t...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
On Living to 100 or More
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySometime 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 uncles and aunts in their 60s and 70s. Occasional news stories, always with a picture, reported on those few people who made it to 100. I am now 85 an...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Canada Marches toward Expansive Aid in Dying
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The Case for Expanding Physician-Assisted Death to Psychiatric Conditions
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayShould 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 it for psychiatric conditions. However, though rare, it is allowed in Belgium and ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
A Body With Bullet Holes and the Right to Arm Ourselves
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAt 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 the trauma bay, his blood pressure perilously low. The surgeons searched his body for blood. They cut off his clothes and rolled his ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Making an Example of Martin Shkreli
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLast 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 toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a parasite that lives inside a third of humans but can cause life-thre...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
From Jackie and Me: A Plea for Opt-Out Organ Donation
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThree 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 flu. A few days later she was really ill, and her partner and another dear friend persuaded her to go to an emergency c...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
California’s Strides in Providing Health Care for Undocumented Immigrants
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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 services, as well as to require doctors, teachers, and others to report those suspected of viola...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Supreme Court Decision in King v Burwell: Backstory and Next Steps
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 impossible for sick people to purchase insurance. Second, it expands Medicaid dram...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Rats Have Empathy, But What About the Scientists Who Experiment on Them?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayDecades 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 to themselves. It’s time to apply what we’ve learned from these animals and stop conductin...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
When Words Matter: Medical Education and the Care of Transgender Patients
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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 I’ll call Jamie, didn’t appear to fit into a narrowly defined version of gender. I wasn’t sure whether to refer to Jamie as she, he...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Suing for Justice? More on the U.S. STD Studies in Guatemala
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOn 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 behalf of more than 750 Guatemalans alleged to have been harmed when the U.S. Public Health Service and the...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Drug that Cried “Feminism”
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayBranded 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 (HSDD), a questionable condition promoted by pharmaceutical companies to sel...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
New York City’s Compromise on Dangerous Circumcision Practice Leaves Infants at Risk
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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 phrase, translatable as suction by mouth, refers to a custom performed after a circumcision in which...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Lessons from Ebola: Presidential Bioethics Commission Releases Recommendations on Preparedness for Public Health Emergencies
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis 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 public health emergency response, with a focus on the U.S. response to the current Ebola e...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Measles, Vaccination, and the Tragedy of the Commons
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Vaccine Exemptions and the Church-State Problem
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 19 states also offer exemptions based on some sort of personal philosophy. The New York Times feature...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Have a Miscarriage and Go to Jail? Potential Consequences of Personhood Amendments
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhen 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. While her sentence was overturned on January 21, her original conviction of homicide was the result of Article 1 of El Salv...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Don’t Categorically Refuse CPR to Ebola Patients
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayRecently 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 solely on a patient’s diagnosis rather than his prognosis would be unique in modern medical practice. Beyond ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Two Cheers for Choosing Wisely
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 harm caused by unnecessary tests and treatments, while helping to bring down medical costs. But the real challenge to the ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Trapper’s Care in the Animal ER and Frank Talk about Costs
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Responding to Ebola: Health Care Professionals’ Obligations to Provide Care
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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 the mixed history of health care providers’ willingness to care for patients during epidemics and pandemics, an...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: Questions about Resuscitation
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhile 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, this question has not been raised in clinical ethics. We must now consider whether unilateral do-not-resuscitate...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The VA Crisis is Fundamentally an Ethics Crisis
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 critical and necessary—but they are not a sufficient long-term and comprehensive solution to a pro...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Hobby Lobby Decision Likely to Increase Health Care Inequity
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 Affordable Care Act (ACA): to expand access to health care by creating a system in which access to health care is ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Chronicling the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Through Art
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How I Learned Bioethics in Medical School
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LEGGO the Logo? Why Pharma Logos Belong on CME
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySeveral 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 continuing medical education (CME) that most practicing physicians must obtain in o...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Latest Challenge to Health Privacy: Health Care Consolidation
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 is taking place are through mergers of hospitals and health systems, development of accountab...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Despite the Risks, and Because of Them, the FDA Should Permit Recycling Medical Implants
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What Role Should Bioethics Play in Global Health?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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 on our unequal world. More importantly, Dr. Benatar’s focus on ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Truvada: No Substitute for Responsible Sex
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA 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 in question is Truvada, a combination antiretroviral commonly used to treat HIV infection. In 2012, Truvada was approved by the U.S. Food a...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Bioethics and the Dogma of “Brain Death”
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayTwo 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 an individual correctly diagnosed as “brain dead” is dead, pure and si...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
“Health Care as Hospitality”: Organizational Ethics in a Migrant Health Clinic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayGeylang 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 of the contemporary, booming city. Its restaurants and its vernacular “shophouse” architecture link its street culture to o...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Genetic Information Is Not Always Benign
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayEthicists 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 likely when people are being informed about predispositions to diseases that are no...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
New Recommendations for Research with Human Subjects Who Lack Consent Capacity
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 of involving cognitively impaired adults to participate in human subjects research (HSR). Th...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Bloomberg’s Health Legacy: What Inflames Consumer Passions in the Food Wars?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAfter 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 into my inbox. The messages were not intellectual arguments supporting free enterprise or limited governme...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Canada Confronts its Own “Tuskegee” Studies
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLast 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 decades ago, the pain in Canada’s First Nations communities was fresh. First N...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
In Search of Sterility
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 had never wanted children. In college I met a man who felt the same way. We fell in love a...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Doctors Googling Patients
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 more about a patient who came to them with a request for a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy. The patient’s s...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Charging Smokers Higher Health Insurance Rates: Is it Ethical?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySmoking-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 medical and economic toll of smoking, it is not surprising that 58 percent of Americans favor ch...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Supreme Court and the Fight Against AIDS
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 to spend–along with the equally vital power to tax–provides government with authori...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
“Undocumented Doctors” and the Health of the Dreamers
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLoyola 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 response to the promise implicit in DACA....Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Sports Concussions and Sandbagging
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySport-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 players not return to play on the same day they were injured a...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Touching History
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAIDS 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 was originally spelled. The exhibit works on several levels: historically, as a story about how one city and region...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Learning to Talk Like a Doctor
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThree 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 and Monolo, introduced themselves and asked how old I was, where I was from, and how many sisters and brothers I had. Within a few minute...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Why Target National Obesity Rates?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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. The article has provoked a great deal of public attention on blogs and web news sites since its...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Why Target National Obesity Rates?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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. The article has provoked a great deal of public attention on blogs and web news sites since ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
A More Ethical Strategy Against Obesity: Changing the Built Environment
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySince 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 to 32 percent in 2004. According to some estimates, 41 percent of U.S. adults will be obese by 2015 and 75 p...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Obesity and Public Health: No Place for Shame
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 all efforts to combat it have failed, and failed miserably. Change, in a large and most revolutionary...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Controversy in the Hastings Center Report: Responding to an Article on Obesity
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayNearly 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 disappointing. So what should be done about it? In the January-February issue of the Hastings Center Report, an arti...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Rites and Wrongs: Changing a Ritual from Within
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 the representation of Jews. I would guess that most Americans, even Jewish-Amer...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
TEDMED 2012: Great Expectations
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayTEDMED, 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, musicians, artists, poets, and, yes, bioethicists — a diverse...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
What is an Ounce of Prevention Really Worth?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIs 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 lot of attention when it was made in the Hastings Center Report 35 years ago by philosopher Benjamin Freedman. Now, on the 15thanni...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Why Shame Won’t Stop Obesity
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New Hope for Detecting Consciousness in Vegetative Patients: Ethical Implications
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPatients 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. These patients have profound brain injuries that leave them in the seemingly anomalous condition of being awak...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Administration Reveals Lack of CLASS
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 – a basic guaranteed lifetime benefit of at least $50 a day in the event of illness or disability to be use...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
“M,” Polly, and the Right to Die
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAnother 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 in a minimally conscious state (after contracting viral encephalitis nearly 10 years ago) cannot be allowed to die (by having artificial ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Blotto, Not Beautiful, Medicine
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayReading 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 family practice doctor. It’s true the argument had driven me to drink, but that wasn’t the essence of the connection betw...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Dying for Some Standards: Broken Medical Systems as Revealed by a New FDA Warning
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI’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 of death among children treated with recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH) in attempts to make them taller.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Tale of Tea with Jim the Third
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Pink Boys with Puppy Dog Tails
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 gender conservative. Sarah didn’t quite put it that way, but that was the gist of her message, and given that I’m usually accused of being a gender ra...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Attenuated Thoughts
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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 I begged off, claiming I had too many other things on my plate. True, but the bigger reason for avoiding the proj...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Bad Vibrations
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn “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, Solomon used the published reports of the Tuskegee syphilis study – which in...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Intersex and Sports: Back to the Same Old Game
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Medicine Needs a Declaration of Independence from Cosmetic Procedures
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How and Why to Take “Gender Identity Disorder” Out of the DSM
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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 American transgender activists have lately been fairly unified and very vocal about the need to remove “Gend...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The AMA’s Apology: What’s the Benefit?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis past week, the AMA officially issued a “mea culpa” for its history of engaging in discrimination against African-American physicians – except it’s more like a “they-a culpa,” since the AMA administrators are actually apologizing for bad behavior on the part of their predecessors. ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Lavish Dwarf Entertainment
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Selective Parenting
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayFor 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 practice might better be called “selective parenting.” It fundamentally reflects, aft...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Products of Conception
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayDeborah 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 looking for more information about what had happened to her until January of 2006. That’s when Deb wrote to say she was wanted some help, so that’...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ashley and the Dangerous Myth of the Selfless Parent
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayBecause 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 the “Ashley Treatment.” Nine-year-old Ashley’s parents decided to remove their severely cognitively-impaired daught...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Really Changing Sex
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOn 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 not had sex-change surgery.” Under the new plan “being considered by the city’s Board of Health… people born in the city would...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Explaining More, Doing Less
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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 consent – telling patients what the best available studies show about their options – their patients migh...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Taking People at Their Word
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhen 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, power, and money were at work everywhere. So were the psychological and social mechanisms that kept everybody else fro...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Proof that I Like Penises
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySo, 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 boys are holding up the dozens of national news accounts of this saying to me, “See?! See?!” Like I j...Read the Post
Health and Health Care
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