Bioethics.net

January 9, 2013

Son's Perspective on Using VSED to Hasten Death

The following is an essay by Marc Newhouse on his mother's use of VSED.  Marc Newhouse is a former cellist, nurse, and English teacher.  He is now a book author who blogs at Life, Death and Iguanas. In April of 2010, my...

January 8, 2013

Legal Briefing: POLST: Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment

With Melinda Hexum, I just published "Legal Briefing: POLST: Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment." in The Journal of Clinical Ethics 23, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 353-76.  Here is the abstract: This issue’s “Legal Briefing” colu...

April 10, 2012

Caplan on Prescription Drug Abuse

Today Art Caplan, in his MSNBC column, discusses the epidemic of prescription drug abuse in this country. But his conclusions would have a chilling effect upon physicians.…

June 24, 2011

Patients Gifting to Providers: Ethical or Suspect?

Art Caplan asks this very question in his MSNBC column this week. When a wealthy recluse died at the age of 104, to whom did she leave her fortune?…

June 4, 2011

The Death of Dr. Death: Good Gossip for the Blogosphere

With so much ink and space within the blogosphere already used to reflect on the death of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, it only seems fitting that we share with you some of the best perspectives on the controversial, death-obsessed man who turned the end-of-life debate on its head for so much of the 1990s.…

April 28, 2010

Ethics of Rationing End-of-Life Care: Can We Ever Agree?

A PBS forum with Arthur Caplan and others asked the BIG question about rationing end-of-life care, and perhaps rationing in general: can we as a society ever agree as to what the rational goals of health care can be at the end of life?…

April 27, 2010

Green in Life, Green in Death

The environmental craze has extended to the funeral industry–at least in California. You can now, apparently, “go out green” and find a way to find a “an eco-friendlier alternative to cremation and burial” called water resolution, says the Arizona Daily Star.…

April 2, 2010

Five Years After Schiavo--Looking Back, Looking Forward

As you may have read here on bioethics.net this week, the headline from MSNBC read “5 Years After Schiavo, Few Make End-of-Life Plans.” What the headline really means, of course, is that following this landmark case that was so influential, not only in the world of bioethics, but also in the halls of Congress and that resonated throughout the nation, nothing has changed in terms of the number of people who are filling out advance directives.…

March 5, 2010

End of Life-ology

William King is dying from MS. His two twenty-something sons, Ennis and Malcolm, already lost their mother to cancer 15 years earlier and now must deal with his slow deterioration.…

December 5, 2009

Apples, Oranges, and Comas by Art Caplan

Wesley Smith has a new column out,
in which he inappropriately uses the case in Belgium of Rom Houben to argue that somehow Terri Schiavo should not have
been permitted to have her feeding tube removed.…