“What’s happening with my son?” a woman on the other end of the phone asked me. I wasn’t sure what to say.  I was training to be a psychiatrist, and...

We put on navy blue scrubs, plastic aprons, goggles, and gloves and walked into the anatomical dissection rooms for the first time.Three other first-year medical students and I gathered around...

 On a bright Sunday morning in New York’s Central Park, as October leaves bid a variegated farewell to green, nascent golds and auburns yielded for a few short hours to...

Conventional wisdom: Making environmentally friendly changes is a luxury that most hospitals can’t afford. Evidence: Making environmentally friendly changes can save hospitals a lot of money – and save the...

On November 15, the Department of Justice announced that BP Exploration and Production Inc. agreed to plead guilty to 11 counts of felony manslaughter, one count of felony obstruction of...

 By now the story of Susan Reverby’s discovery of John Cutler’s papers is well known. In 2010, she revealed details of the Guatemala studies from the U. S. Public Health...

It’s no secret that community-based mental health and substance use treatment services are underfunded, but less widely known is the extent of the problem. Since 2009, the height of the...

I teach a seminar on ethics in health care in the newly-launched Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program at Yale.  My students include advanced practice registered nurses (nurse practitioners), senior...

Some years ago I wrote a book on abortion that espoused women’s right to choose abortion and was later cited in Roe v. Wade. That should have made me popular with...

On Monday, New America Foundation in Washington, DC held a thought-provoking event, My Brain Made Me Do It, which explored the role of neuroscience in understanding human behavior, particularly that...

A recent flurry of articles in the mainstream media (The Atlantic,CNN, Huffington Post) reflects yet another wave of protest against the Food and Drug Administration’s blood donation policy, which prohibits men who...

In a presidential campaign riven with disagreement about nearly everything to do with health care, there is a notable area of bipartisan accord: both parties support improving children’s health and...

I am a breast cancer survivor and I am not a fan of the huge “pink” industry that has developed around breast cancer. We have ribbons, pins, and bands. We...

With the first presidential debate beginning tonight and the race entering the final stretch, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are making their final policy pitches to the American public. While...

On Monday, the Global Post published Inside Syria: One Hospital’s Story, which offers a glimpse into an emergency room in Aleppo, Syria, flooded with wounded Syrians. “I didn’t see this amount of blood...

Blair and Alfred Sadler reported here a few weeks ago on the effect of Facebook’s feature, introduced last spring, that enables users to link to their local organ donation registries and share their...

For decades, all undocumented migrants in Spain have had access health care, but that changed drastically on September 1, when a new law went into effect that provides coverage to...

Male newborn circumcision has been much in the news of late. In Germany, the procedure was criminalized in the Cologne Regional Court, and on August 21 the firstmohel(Jewish traditional practitioner)...

The American Academy of Pediatricians recently released a statement saying that the health benefits of circumcision outweighed the risks. This pronouncement contradicts the Academy’s earlier ruling, just thirteen years ago in 1999, which...

While at the National Institutes of Health in 1967 and 1968, we were involved in the design and drafting of the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, in partnership with the Commissioners...

If movies are one window into the soul of America, “Robot and Frank” has some funny/sad things to say about our current approach to aging. Frank (Frank Langella, as charismatic...

An unusually lengthy and undoubtedly expensive 90-second commercial for Androgel aired during men’s swimming and volleyball events in NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. The ad touts Androgel 1.62%, a more concentrated formulation...

It may be more than just discrimination at work. As is to be expected, once people start reflecting on an essay as important and provocative as Bill Peace’s“Comfort Care as...

I suspect most people with a disability fear even the most routine hospitalization. We do not fear any of the commonplace indignities those without a disability worry about when hospitalized....

In December 2011, a landmark Institute of Medicine (IOM) report concluded that advances in science and medicine “have rendered chimpanzees largely unnecessary as research subjects.” Yet a recent search on the U.S....

This is the third commentary about “Comfort Care as Denial of Personhood,” a powerful essay in the July-August Hastings Center Reportthat describes a chilling encounter between a physician and a seriously ill disabled patient.  The author,...

This is the second commentary about “Comfort Care as Denial of Personhood,” a powerful essay in the July-August Hastings Center Report that describes a chilling encounter between a physician and a seriously ill disabled patient.  The...

A powerful essay in the July-August Hastings Center Report describes a chilling encounter between a physician and a seriously ill disabled patient.  The author, William J. Peace, who has been paralyzed from...

I write this in the last days of the run-up to the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act. If it comes down against the ACA in some important...

Regardless of the fate of the Affordable Care Act, it has set in motion a drive toward greater use of information technology, particularly with regard to electronic health records (EHRs)....

Mark Bittman, the New York Times food writer who created the no-fail “minimalist” recipes affixed to many a locavore refrigerator door, is an ethical maximalist.  In his 1994 book, Thick and Thin:Moral Argument...

Some people are addicted to crossword puzzles, others to new shoes, and still others to collecting baseball statistics. One of my addictions is that of comparing policy arguments in very...

The most seemingly sensible diagnosis of our health care cost problem over the years has been to reduce or eliminate waste and inefficiency. Of late that interest has greatly accelerated....

I recently landed in a New York City hospital due to complications from diverticulitis coupled with a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic that I was taking to treat the...

Last Thursday, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues met in Washington, DC to assess the ethics of a clinical trial on anthrax vaccines for children. Secretary of Health and...

In my seven years as head of the Center of Biomedical Ethics and Culture (CBEC) at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT) in Karachi I am often asked...

Eager to join the ongoing “war on women” and seize the opportunity to roll back women’s reproductive rights, Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed into law the Women’s Health and Safety...

I was teaching a group of nursing students at a major New York City hospital a few months ago when one young student came to me, pale and perspiring. She...

A recent editorial in The Lancet issued a dire warning to the international medical community: medicine is a weapon of war in Syria. It is just the latest in a series of...

In December, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released a 200-page report, Moral Science: Protecting Participants in Human Subjects in Research. Continuing a decades-old tradition, the report treats...