The government and many residents of the state of Texas like to brag about their love of personal freedom and individual choice. That is why it is so strange and morally repugnant that the state has turned for guidance on how to manage reproductive decisions to the Chinese Communist Party of the Mao Zedong era.

Many hospitals are providing incomplete or subpar professional medical interpretation to the patients who need it--many of whom are disproportionately affected by Covid.

In the more than 35 years since federal legislation created organ procurement organizations (OPOs) to recover organs from deceased donors for transplantation, there has been a disparity in their performance, with the best OPOs recovering organs from four times as many donors as the worst OPOs by obj...

The pandemic magnified the inherent difficulty and stress of conversations involving life-sustaining treatment by forcing clinicians and patients to engage in life-altering discussions via telephone and video conference, restricting nonverbal communication and eye contact, and eliminating the benefit of simply having another person nearby in time of crisis.

In recent years, court cases and scholarly articles have increasingly highlighted discrepancies between the legal definition of death in the United States and the medical diagnostic standards for determining brain death. It has become clear to many that the 40-year-old Uniform Determination of Death Act, the legal standard, should be updated.

Several years ago, one of us decided to donate a kidney to someone who needed one. She didn’t anticipate the difficulties that would arise from the process by which donors are evaluated.

Aducanumab has just been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to slow the progress of Alzheimer’s disease. It is likely that many people who are candidates for the drug will no longer be competent to make their own health care decisions, and will be relying heavily on others to make the decision with them or for them. As a layperson, how would I evaluate the risks and benefits of this drug, were I acting as a health care proxy for someone with Alzheimer’s disease?

June 7, 2021, was a bad day for science. That was the day Food and Drug Administration approved aducanumab for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, even though a committee of its own selected experts recommended strongly against approval.

In late May, an international organization eliminated a 40-year prohibition against human embryo research beyond 14 days. The legal and scientific consequences will vary around the world.

The American myth of rugged individualism, which often means “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps,” is outdated, was never completely accurate. It is on full display during the coronavirus pandemic, contributing to cases and deaths.

The United States, Russia, and China support temporary patent waivers for Covid vaccines. The waivers, which need support from other countries, would likely save lives in low- and middle-income countries.

Changes in abortion law threaten to undermine a major benefit of prenatal diagnosis, namely the ability of pregnant women to choose whether or not to continue their pregnancies upon learning of a serious fetal condition.