I just finished my latest “Legal Briefing” column for the Journal of Clinical Ethics. (I can’t believe this is my already my fifth year.) This one covers recent legal developments involving the Patient Self Determination Act (PSDA). &nb…
Blog.
[Fox News] Two paralyzed British men who want to die but cannot kill themselves went to court on Monday seeking protection from prosecution for those who could help them end their lives.
The case is one of the most high-profile attempts to change t…
David Brooks is a pretty solidly moderate conservative, and one who is a big fan of behavioral science. But that doesn’t mean he can see beyond his own biases, especially when describing the differences between conservatives and liberals. He was part…
05/13/2013
Great Picture on Drug Development Targets
Matthew Herper and Erin Carlyle at Forbes magazine recently put together a wonderful picture, showing what kinds of diseases pharmaceutical companies are targeting now in developing new drugs. The bigger the bubble, the larger the number of drugs under…
05/13/2013
Learning to Talk Like a Doctor
Three years before beginning medical school, I got off a bus in Granada, Spain and met the family I would be living with for four months. My host parents, Carmen and Monolo, introduced themselves and asked how old I was, where I was from, and how many …
[New York Times] WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Friday stepped up his criticism of the Obama administration, accusing the Justice Department of making “frivolous” and “silly” arguments in its attempt to delay making the morning-after emergen…
[New York Times] WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Friday stepped up his criticism of the Obama administration, accusing the Justice Department of making “frivolous” and “silly” arguments in its attempt to delay making the morning-after emergen…
[Kaiser Health News] Until it happened to him, Itzhak Brook, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University School of Medicine, didn’t think much about the problem of misdiagnosis.
That was before doctors at a Maryland hospita…
05/10/2013
Hospital Pricing Insanity
Once again, lots of reports in the news about crazy variation in hospital prices in the United States, with thousands or tens of thousands of dollars difference in the price of services from one hospital to its neighbor across the street. Marketplace d…
In the most recent issue of the Hastings Center Report, Drs. Amy Gutmann, and James Wagner of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (the Bioethics Commission), contributed to the lively debate surrounding the identifiability of…