Bioethics
terrasig | February 15, 2008Apologies that I've been a bit preoccupied to put up my own content last night and today. In the meantime, I must direct you to an excellent ethics discussion by the always insightful Prof Janet Stemwedel on the research program led by Dr Edythe London, the UCLA researcher who has been terrorized personally by the Animal Liberation Front.
Janet's thoughtful analysis of this situation exemplifies why she is one of the leading bioethics commentators on the web today. I share Janet's concern that the public has been unusually silent in response to the attacks on Dr London.
terrasig | February 13, 2008
We comply with the HONcode standard for trustworthy healthinformation:verify here.
Regular readers may note that I have been diddling with the content of my left sidebar and posting a new disclaimer tab to indicate the accuracy and objectivity of the health information presented herein.
I added these details as part of my application for accreditation by the Swiss-based Health on the Net (HON) Foundation, a non-profit organization formed in 1996 to deal with the then-new issue of how a reader can determine the quality and objectivity of medical information on a website. You can…
sporte | February 13, 2008Confused about terms like "autonomy" and "beneficance" and their relationship to biomedical research?
The Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR) is offering a short course at the University of Washington, Feb. 29th and March 1st, on Ethics in Science.
Registration details and a description are below.
An Ethics Shortcourse
February 29, 2008, 4-8pm and March 1, 10am-4pm Waterfront Activities
Center, University of Washington
Registration Deadline: February 15, 2008 To apply online, please visit:http://www.nwabr.org/education/esc.htm
$25 with credit card or $20 with check. Course…
terrasig | January 29, 2008. . .that's the message from Dr Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, to heroin and morphine users whose lives might be saved in the overdose situation by public distribution of "overdose rescue kits" comprised of a $9.50 nasal spray containing Narcan.
Narcan is the brand name for naloxone, an antagonist (blocker) of these drugs at μ opioid receptors. When an overdose of opioid drugs binds to these receptors in the respiratory control center of a primitive part of our brain, one stops breathing, a situation that pathologists say is "…
j7uy5 | January 9, 2008The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments in Baze v. Rees
(
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/07/AR2008010700618.html">WaPo,
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/washington/07cnd-scotus.html">NYT).
This is a case about a guy who killed a sheriff and a deputy.
He is on death row in Kentucky. Kentucky plans to
execute him using a three-drug cocktail: sodium thiopental, pancuronium
bromide, and potassium chloride.
Thiopental is a barbiturate sedative; pancuronium is a paralyzing
agent; potassium chloride is a salt. The barbiturate causes a
loss…
oracknows | January 3, 2008The other day, I happened across an Op-Ed article in the New York Times that left me scratching my head at the seeming insanity of the incident it described. The article, written by Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, described what seemed on the surface to be an unbelievable travesty:
In Bethesda, MD, in a squat building off a suburban parkway, sits a small federal agency called the Office for Human Research Protections. Its aim is to protect people. But lately you have to wonder. Consider this…
oracknows | December 20, 2007Evidence-based medicine is not perfect.
There, I've said it. Like anything else humans do in science or any other endeavor, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has its strengths and its weaknesses. On the whole, I consider it to be potentially vastly superior to the way that medicine was practiced in the past, bringing a systematic, scientific rigor to how we practice to replace parts of medicine that tended to be based as much (or more) on tradition or dogma as on evidence. Naturally, a common source of attacks on EBM is advocates of "alternative medicine," who often appeal to "different ways of…
oracknows | December 18, 2007Several months ago, i wrote quite a few posts about a new anticancer drug that had not yet passed through clinical trials but had demonstrated efficacy against tumors in rat models of cancer. The drug, called dichloroacetate (DCA), is a small molecule that targeted a phenomenon common in cancer cells known as the Warburg effect. Because DCA is a small molecule that is relatively easy to synthesize, the misguided news stories proclaiming it the "cure" for cancer that big pharma wouldn't fund because it was not patentable spawned a cottage industry of charlatans who used the Internet to sell…
oracknows | December 10, 2007Dr. Rashid Buttar is a quack. There, I've said it. It's my opinion, and there's lots of evidence to support that opinion. As you know, I seldom actually invoke the "q-word." Indeed, for the longest time after I started blogging I tended to go out of my way to avoid using it, even to the point of being a bit ridiculous, but in Dr. Buttar's case I now have little choice but to make my opinion of him plain.
I've noticed before that, as far as antivaccination cranks and the mercury militia go, when it rains it pours, and stories about such lunacy seem to come in waves. Weeks can go by without my…
j7uy5 | December 9, 2007Last year, on the occasion of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_AIDS_Day">World
AIDS Day, President Bush promised to reform a discriminatory
policy that blocks most persons with HIV from entering the USA.
The current rule does allow for waivers, but the process is cumbersome
and unscientific.
Now, one week after this year's World AIDS Day, we learn that the
proposed new rule is worse than the one it would
replace.
As reported in
href="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/91059.php">Medical
News Today:
The proposed rule further discriminates
against visitors with HIV by…
oracknows | December 5, 2007Lest I forget to mention this one, Randy Cohen, a.k.a. The Ethicist, answers a question. Here's the question:
I work at a hospital where several nurses practice therapies like healing touch and therapeutic touch, said to adjust a patient's energy field and thereby decrease pain and improve healing, although there is no significant evidence for this. If those nurses believe in these treatments, may they tell the patient they are effective? If the treatments provide merely a placebo effect, telling patients about this lack of evidence might undermine that benefit. Would that justify withholding…
oracknows | December 3, 2007I've been spending a bit of time discussing the sad case of Dennis Lindberg, a 14-year-old youth with leukemia who died because of his refusal to accept a blood transfusion when his hematocrit fell to life-threateningly low levels apparently during chemotherapy. My position is that, while competent adults have the right to refuse transfusion for whatever reason they wish, children are not able to understand the implications of their actions and therefore must be protected from such beliefs. I do point out that I understand that the situation may not be as clear-cut in the case of an…
oracknows | December 1, 2007Yesterday, I wrote about the overwhelmingly sad case of Dennis Lindberg, the 14-year old Jehovah's Witness who died because of his misguided adherence to the twisted interpretation of a 3,000 year old Biblical text and the court's acquiescence to this lunacy. So did P. Z. Myers. In response to the post on Pharyngula, I saw a comment that disturbed me greatly:
At the hospital where I work we have a procedure in place just for JW's. We have a stack of court orders waiting. When the patient loses consciousness a doctor fills out a form declaring them no longer capable of making their own…
oracknows | November 29, 2007It looks as though the Jehovah's Witnesses have claimed another life. This time, though, it wasn't an adult, as it was recently. This time, though, through the indoctrination inherent in the Jehovah's Witness religion and, incredibly and inexcusably, the acquiescence of our legal system to their irrational and dubious interpretation of a text written thousands of years before blood transfusion was ever contemplated, the life lost was that of an adolescent:
A 14-year-old boy who refused blood transfusions in his fight against leukemia -- based on religious beliefs -- died Wednesday night in…
oracknows | November 26, 2007Fellow ScienceBlogger Abel Pharmboy over at Terra Sig pointed me in the direction of a rather fascinating and disturbing article about physicians being recruited as "thought leaders" by pharmaceutical companies. Abel's discussion is well worth reading for yourself, but I thought I'd chime in my two cents, as always.
From a surgeon's perspective, these sorts of "opportunities" are much different, because most of us general surgeons and surgical oncologists only prescribe a rather limited range of drugs. For example, I rarely prescribe anything other than narcotics for postoperative pain relief…
terrasig | November 25, 2007As I sat to write a post this morning, I became more engaged in a story in the New York Times magazine by Dr Daniel Carlat entitled, "Dr. Drug Rep." Joseph of Corpus Callosum recently commented here about being solicited to recommend fellow physicians in the local area and nationally who he perceived as "thought leaders" in his specialty.
Carlat was such a physician who was cultivated by Wyeth to discuss their antidepressant, Effexor XR, to fellow physicians at conferences and in doctors' offices. His piece in the NYT magazine chronicles his development by Wyeth as a drug spokesperson and…
oracknows | November 16, 2007It may take a long time, but sometimes justice does eventually move to act against a wrong:
A Butler County doctor will stand trial on charges he caused the death of a 5-year-old autistic boy by negligently ordering a controversial treatment, a district judge ordered Thursday.
Dr. Roy Kerry of Portersville ordered chelation therapy - which the federal Food and Drug Administration approves for treating acute heavy-metal poisoning, but not for autism - on Abubakar Tariq Nadama in 2005. During a third treatment, on Aug. 23, the boy went into cardiac arrest and died.
Kerry, 69, is charged with…
j7uy5 | November 10, 2007Is it just me, or do others find this article to be
offensive?
href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1681838,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-healthsci">When
the Patient Is a Googler
By SCOTT HAIG
Thursday, Nov. 08, 2007 We had never met, but as we talked on the phone I knew she
was Googling me. The way she drew out her conjunctions, just a little,
that was the tip off — stalling for time as new pages loaded.
It was barely audible, but the soft click-click of the keyboard in the
background confirmed it. Oh, well, it's the information age. Normally,
she'd have to go through my staff…
j7uy5 | November 8, 2007Athletic regulatory bodies have a new headache.
This time, the pain is being caused by placebos (an
unexpected side effect!)
As
href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626285.400-placebo-boost-is-a-conundrum-for-sports-regulators.html">reported
in New Scientist, athletes have found
that they can exert themselves to a greater extent, while under the
influence of opioid pain killers. That is not permitted in
competition, of course, but there is a wrinkle. If they train
while under the influence, then get a placebo prior to competition,
their brains react to the placebo as if it…
j7uy5 | November 7, 2007A recent study indicates that the lifetime cost of medical
care for
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will be greater than the cost of the war
to date. We really have no choice, but it is going to cost
us. A lot. Of course, the ones really paying are
the troops themselves. From Medscape (free registration
required).
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/565407">High
Rate of PTSD in Returning Iraq War Veterans
Bob Roehr
November 6, 2007 (Washington, DC)
—
Estimates of the rate of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among
veterans returning from Iraq range from 12% to 20%. With…