Recently, a generally healthy friend of mine had two small, unrelated surgeries over the course of a few months. For the first, a small operation on his hand, he received a prescription for 30 oxycodone pills. He used one the night after surgery, to make sure pain wouldn’t wake him. Over the next few days Read more
Bioethics
The bedrock requirement to obtain informed consent before patients may be enrolled in research has been eroding. I’ve documented the different ways and different reasons for this several times here over the years (Informed Consent for Babies: When Experts Disagree, Informed Consent in Infant Research: Ethical Problems Remain, Informed Consent in Comparative Effectiveness Research and Read more
Finding the fine line between respecting autonomy and abandoning those with dementia is a crucial task that deserves more attention.
Editors’ Note: This article originally appeared in STAT on Dec. 5, 2017. “Smart pills” that can track whether or when you’ve taken your medication might be helpful for some people. Unfortunately, the first smart pill approved by the Food and Drug Administration, Abilify MyCite, is a drug used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. That raises tricky ethical issues. Decades of Read more
Editors’ Note: On May 24, Dr. Andrew Racine gave the keynote address at Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s joint Masters Degree ceremony for Einstein’s Clinical Research Training Program and the Einstein-Cardozo Master of Bioethics program. Dr. Racine, professor of clinical pediatrics at Einstein and system senior vice president and chief medical officer at Montefiore Health System, shared his insights about Read more
It has been purported that one of the major take-home messages from the bizarre events of 2016 is that we are now living in a “post-truth” world. Indeed, that very phrase was dubbed the “word of the year” by Oxford Dictionaries, which defines it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are Read more
