Hot Topics: Professionalism
by Alyssa Burgart
Last night, my phone exploded with texts from colleagues when a former anesthesiology resident at Oregon Health Sciences University, the famous “Tik Tok Doc” was named in a $45 million sexual assault complaint.…
Full Article
by David Oxman, MD, HEC-C
Vaccines for COVID-19 are becoming available, with the first batches of a highly effective vaccine adminstered this past week.…
Full ArticleFor those who are aware of the dreadful 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v Bell, the subject of the forced sterilizations of ‘undesirable’ people is not new. In a blog written over three years ago after the publication of Adam Cohen’s book Imbeciles, I stated, “If we devalue a person simply because they do not meet …
Continue reading "“Belly of the Beast”"
Full Article
by Keisha Ray, PhD
This was originally given as part of the plenary session “What about the ‘H’ in ‘ASBH'”? at the 2020 annual meeting of The American Society of Bioethics and Humanities
As many of you may recall, when you are junior bioethicist, like myself, you often get a lot of unsolicited advice from more senior bioethicists.…
Full Article
by Craig Klugman
In a startling whistleblower report, Dawn Looten who is a licensed nurse practitioner at the Irwin County (GA) Detention Center (ICDC) stated that patients were denied COVID tests, medical records were altered and destroyed, and most disturbingly, that a very high number of hysterectomies were performed on detained immigrant women who may not have understood what was being done to them.…
Full Article
Keisha Ray, Ph.D.
Recently the term black bioethics has been having its moment. With the world’s recently increased attention to racial justice, institutional racism, and medical racism, there has been more attention to the relationship between black people and health and health care. …
Full Article
by Craig Klugman, Ph.D.
Tommye Austin is senior vice president and chief nursing officer at University Hospital in San Antonio. Like most Texas hospitals, UH has been hard hit by the pandemic in recent weeks and PPE is in short supply.…
Full Article
by Amy C. Reese, Pharm.D.
My pharmacy received a prescription for prednisolone solution written for a 5-year-old patient. We only had the manufacturer of prednisolone with 5% alcohol in it as a solvent.…
Full Article
by Christine Grady, RN Ph.D., and Connie Ulrich, Ph.D. RN FAAN
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Claudius famously notes “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”…
Full Article
by Annie Janvier, MD, PhD and John D. Lantos MD
The COVID-19 crisis has been compared to war. Providers are being drafted.…
Full ArticleWhat the HEC-C? An Analysis of the Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified Program: One Year in
The Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified Program: Fair, Feasible, and Defensible, But Neither Definitive Nor Finished
Taxonomizing Views of Clinical Ethics Expertise
Principles of Biomedical Ethics: Marking Its Fortieth Anniversary
What can we do moving forward address disparities from COVID-19? Possibly, “a Covid Commission can help to untangle the scope and role government-sanctioned misinformation played in the U.S. death toll from the pandemic”
Full ArticleWhat drives vaccine hesitancy among healthcare workers? “The hesitancy is less outright rejection than cautious skepticism. It’s driven by suspicions about the evidence supporting the new vaccines and about the motives of those endorsing them.”
Full Article“The coronavirus has led many to reassess the risks and sacrifices that come with the job, and how consequential health care will be…simultaneously, people are recognizing the longstanding weaknesses and inequalities of America’s medical system.”
Full Article“The question then is this: Is it appropriate to continue to keep children out of school until teachers or reticent politicians feel they have a degree of certainty about risk that may not arise for a long time, if ever?” What do we need to consider?
Full ArticleAstraZeneca recently disclosed a key mistake in their vaccine trials. How will this impact the trust and reliability of their results? What ethics needs to be considered regarding this mistake? Can these results now hold up with further testing?
Full Article“The clinicians also painted a grim picture of their lives, as the pandemic enters a newly robust phase with record case counts in the United States. About half already said their mental exhaustion was at an all-time high. Many worried about keeping their doors open: about 7 percent said they were not sure they could remain open past December without financial help.”
Full Article“Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, has agreed to plead guilty to three federal criminal charges for its role in creating the nation’s opioid crisis and will pay more than $8 billion and close down the company.” What harm has already been done? The opioid crisis has been a big obstacle to tackle in recent years due to those that struggle with its addiction and the interests of many pharmaceutical companies.
Full Article