Mortgaging Your Womb
I recently participated in a conversation on HuffPo Live about whether fertility finance companies are preying on families desperate to have children. Watch the segment here.
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Autonomy, paternalism and understanding
ByadminI gave a talk Wednesday as part of an ethics series here at Duke. Here is one take on my presentation. See if you can spot the Far Side reference!
Are Doctors Afraid to Talk Math with Their Patients?
ByadminBefore patients can become savvy consumers of healthcare, they need information about their healthcare choices. Too often, such information is nearly impossible to get, especially when it requires doctors to give patients useful statistics about things like treatment side effects. Since publishing Critical Decisions this fall, I have received a number of emails from readers who…
Inappropriate Touching in the Doctor's Office
ByadminI felt a woman’s uterus without her permission. How this happened, and why I thought I had done the right thing at the time, tells us something important about medical education and shows us why doctor/patient interactions often play out like conversations between earthlings and aliens… (Read the rest and view comments at Critical Decisions)
The Predictable Irrationality of Righteous Minds, and the Work of Ethicists
ByadminJennifer spends lots of time with dead things, dead humans actually. She works in a pathology lab. One night, she is asked to incinerate a fresh human cadaver, and she is struck that it would be a waste to throw away perfectly good meat. So, even though she is against killing and is a vegetarian for moral reasons, she…
Is Sex Reassignment Surgery a Basic Human Right?
ByadminI expect most of us agree that an incarcerated felon experiencing a heart attack should receive medical treatment, even if that treatment comes at taxpayers’ expense. The same probably goes for more preventive measures—blood pressure pills, cancer screening tests and the like. While serving out the sentence for their crimes, prisoners should not be forced…
How to Make People Think Robots and Corpses Have Feelings
ByadminThe right to die has played a critical role in the development of the doctor/patient relationship. It was families clamoring for the right to allow their loved ones to die who forced the world to recognize that physicians’ medical decisions aren’t just medical decisions, but involve enormous value judgments. In 1975, Karen Ann Quinlan’s loving…