Who Should Decide Who Gets a Transplant?
Watch this segment from HuffPo Live on two children denied transplants because they were not deemed mentally capable enough to benefit. Two angry moms are fighting back. Love to hear your thoughts.
Watch this segment from HuffPo Live on two children denied transplants because they were not deemed mentally capable enough to benefit. Two angry moms are fighting back. Love to hear your thoughts.
In her deservedly best-selling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot reproduces the language of Lacks’s informed consent document when she was about to undergoing her cancer surgery at Johns Hopkins in 1951: I hereby give consent to the staff of the Johns Hopkins Hospital to perform any operative procedures and under any anesthetic…
I 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 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…
Many people die in ways, and even in locations, that go against their preferences. They don’t want to be put on ventilators and, yet, spend their last days in intensive care units tethered to breathing machines. They don’t want cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), and, yet, receive full-on “codes” when their hearts stop.
Much of this unwanted care could be avoided if patients (aka: “people”) discussed their treatment preferences with their clinicians.
I 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…
Steven Johnson was a rising star at the NordicWear Company, even before that brutal winter of 2002. But then, thanks to a rebate program he instituted for their new line of snow pants, he rocketed up the corporate ladder. His plan was brilliant in its simplicity. Late in the previous winter, he ran a series…