Bioethics.net

May 16, 2013

Vermont Passes Physician-Assisted-Suicide

Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

Awaiting the governor’s signature, Vermont is poised to become the fourth state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. While Oregon and Washington legalized physician-aid-in-dying through public referendum and Montana through a court decision, Vermont’s is occurring through the legislative process.…

May 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.…

May 9, 2013

Magical NC Bill Builds Obstacles to Teen Health

Craig Klugman, Ph.D.

If you’re a teen in North Carolina, a new bill before the legislature may make it more difficult for you to get sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment, mental health counseling, pregnancy care or even substance abuse treatment.…

April 16, 2013

Cass Sunstein Takes on the Death Panel Myth

I wrote a while back about some research I conducted with Jason Reifler and Brendan Nyhan on how fact checking influences people’s belief in whether Obamacare created death panels, to decide which old or disabled peoples to kill.  Yesterday, Cas...

March 27, 2013

Abraham Lincoln on Perspective Taking

I write frequently about the importance of perspective taking in clinician/patient interaction. Seeing the world through other people’s eyes is also a crucial moral and political skill. No surprise then that Abe Lincoln showed great perspective takin...

January 22, 2013

Partisan Drift Over the Environment: Are Republicans Wandering Away from their Voters?

There’s a fascinating new analysis available, looking at parallels between the politics of health care and the environment. It is led by Theda Skocpol, a social scientist at Harvard (whose writing about health policy and the Tea Party are wonderful)...

December 10, 2012

Political opinions: fast herd or slow ideology?

Sometimes politicians make claims that may seem at odds with the ideological background they represent. Would you agree with your party if they presented a statement that went against their ideological foundation? Put this way, you would probably not, ...

October 20, 2011

Food Fight: Industry versus the IOM

If we are what we eat, shouldn’t we know what we are, in fact, eating? This simple idea may be much harder to support than one would guess thanks to lobbying on the part of the food industry, says Arthur Caplan in his MSNBC column today.…

April 7, 2011

Women's Health Shouldn't Be Partisan--But It Is!

As Donna Shalala writes on the Huffington Post today: “health of our women should not be a partisan preference”, but as we all know the politics of women’s health continues to plague access to reproductive health services, equitable access to health services generally, and more broadly remind us that there is still a critical gap between males and females in regard to health in our country.…

November 18, 2010

Moreno Delves Deeper into Bush and Kass' "Decision Points"

Fascinated by Bush’s moral reasoning when it came to his stem cell decision of August 9th, 2001, Jonathan Moreno delves even deeper into the passages of the former president’s autobiography to explore the faulty logic of his position regarding embryonic stem cell research.…