Our recent blog post questioning the value and ethics of physician shadowing has unleashed an avalanche of comments, divergent perspectives – and even spawned a blog post of its own. On February 14, 2013, Dr. Elizabeth Kitsis, a physician and bioethicist, openly questioned whether high school or college students considering a career in medicine or Read more
Bioethics
I was startled to learn, when interviewing medical school applicants, that tagging along with a physician, or “shadowing,” is a common practice among high school and college students these days. Yes, I did say students as young as high schoolers. Shadowing provides a way for students to observe at first hand what it is Read more
Public attention to ethics in research involving human subjects typically emerges from shocking scandals. The best-known examples include the Tuskegee syphilis study, the Willowbrook hepatitis experiments and the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital case. In the Tuskegee study, poor black men in Alabama were observed for more than 40 years to study the natural history of syphilis, and medication was withheld Read more
In September, when I embarked on a career shift and had the opportunity to explore issues of bioethics in which I had long been interested, I found that during every cocktail party or casual discussion, people asked me “Why are you doing that?” The question was quickly followed by a second: “Exactly what is bioethics?” Read more
I was led to reflect on the use (and misuse) of language in discussions of health policy while participating in a conference at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University recently. The word that set off my reflections was ‘autonomy.’ Today, virtually every medical student, intern, resident and practicing physician is familiar with Read more
A young woman named SungEun Grace Lee is dying of a brain tumor on Long Island. Ordinarily this tragedy would have unfolded quietly, but when 28-year-old Ms. Lee decided to withdraw life-sustaining ventilator support, her parents went to court to stop her. Since then, several layers of the legal system have confirmed that Ms. Lee Read more
