Bioethics

  Editors’ Note: Last week, The Doctor’s Tablet published a post by Paul Marantz, M.D., M.P.H., in which he asserted that adding folic acid to the food supply may be helping babies at the expense of harming adults. The widely accepted practice of adding this B vitamin to our food supply is credited with preventing Read more

Public health seeks to prevent disease, prolong life and promote health. Sometimes this requires population-wide interventions that are meant to have benefits but also might cause harm to some. When a single-minded focus on anticipated benefits fails to consider potential risks, our well-meaning efforts may cause more harm than good. This critically important fact is Read more

When those who participate in medical research are unable to consent, who serves as advocates for them? This provocative—and fundamental—question was brought to the fore by a front-page article in last week’s New York Times. A key government agency, the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), has determined that a national study of 1,300 extremely Read more

The randomized, controlled trial (RCT), in which individuals are selected by chance to receive either an experimental intervention or a comparator, is considered the gold standard in clinical biomedical research. Another methodology, which may be less well known, is the “cluster randomized trial.” The cluster trial randomizes at the group level. The group can vary Read more

As a clinician treating autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and related developmental disabilities, I find the advent of relatively inexpensive whole-genome testing tantalizing because we know it will provide a deeper look into the condition of our patients. But the coming wave of testing also troubles me. Technological advances have already provided us with an amazingly helpful Read more