The Vermont legislature has passed a new physician-assisted suicide law and is sending it to Governor Shumlin, who supports it and is expected to sign. The Oregon-style legislation will be the third such state law in the country and the first adopted b…
Blog.
My wife and I spent May 10-11 at the annual conference of Biola’s Center for Christian Thought (CCT), where the theme for 2012-2013 has been “Neuroscience and the Soul.” The plenary talks are not all on the web, yet, although some are on Facebo…
05/15/2013
What Countries Are Successfully Controlling Healthcare Costs, and How Are They Doing That?
In the April issue of Health Affairs, a group of authors explored the cost-containment strategies and four “high income countries“, and try to see what they were doing that we are currently not doing in the United States. The first picture …
05/15/2013
Why do we teach bioethics? Part 3
In two prior posts I wrote about how dealing with a student who committed plagiarism on an ethics paper made me think about why I teach bioethics and what I really want students to learn. Above all Christian ethics is about learning to live a morally u…
When it rains it pours. In addition to the news out of Vermont, today the European Court of Human Rights issued its opinion in the case of Gross v. Switzerland.
Alda Gross has no known pathological condition or clinical illness. &nbs…
05/14/2013
Carbon, Bioethics and Planetary Health
Craig Klugman, Ph.D.
On May 9, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography independently reported measurements of mean concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of nearly 400 parts per million (it was actually 399.89 ppm). For the last 800,000 years, the Earth has not broken 300ppm. This is significant because it shows that despite weak international efforts, atmospheric carbon levels are increasing on an exponential curve.
The number 400ppm is arbitrary but was chosen as a milestone to draw attention to the continuing scientific concern over the increase of atmospheric carbon. The last time that the Earth saw levels this high is believed to be the Pliocene epoch, 3.2 million to 5 million years ago.…
[The Guardian] It was an extraordinarily public declaration of an incredibly private experience. But when Angelina Jolie took to the comment pages of the New York Times to declare that she had undergone a double mastectomy, she spearheaded a new awaren…
05/14/2013
Healthcare Spending and Life Expectancy
I am not a fan of judging the quality of a nation’s healthcare system by examining life expectancy. Many, many factors influence life expectancy that have nothing to do with healthcare. When examining life expectancy in developed countries, for examp…
In its recent report, Safeguarding Children: Pediatric Medical Countermeasure Research, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (the Bioethics Commission) revisited the issue of compensation for research-related injury—an issue…
A month ago, I blogged about Marjorie Mangiaruca’s daughter’s lawsuit against a Florida hospital and nursing home for resuscitating her mother against her wishes. I also included this case in my 83-page analysis of unwanted treatment. &…