Autonomy, paternalism and understanding
I 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!
I 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!
Obamacare gave employers permission to charge smokers up to 50% more for health insurance, as a way to incentivize healthier behavior. But to make sure smokers had a fair chance to avoid these penalties, the law required employers to provide tobacco cessation programs to anyone facing such a surcharge. Almost half of the companies who charge smokers…
Take a look at a brief summary of a new paper i just published, led by a wonderful medical student at Michigan, Michael Kozminski. It shows that oncologists seem to place far greater value on quantity of life over quality of life.
In a recent post, I asked for your thoughts on how you would feel if your doctor posted an anti-health reform letter in his waiting room. Link The letter was a direct quote from one posted in Dr. Hal Scherz’s urology clinic in Atlanta. Scherz is president of Docs4PatientCare. For all I know, Scherz is…
![]()
Ever had a doctor present you with a contract, laying out what you need to do or else? Well, this is an increasingly common practice in medicine.
Michael Volk led a group of us who wrote about this topic recently in The Lancet. Click on this link to check it out.
Not looking my best…but here is a blog post I wrote for the Hastings Center, in which I try to get to the root, so to speak, of an often overlooked issue: cutting dental coverage when trying to lower the cost of health care.
The University of Chicago Medicine’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, where I trained in the early 90s, has been awarded the prestigious Cornerstone Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities for “outstanding contributions from an institution that has helped shape the direction of the fields of bioethics and/or medical humanities.” To learn…