Peter Ubel

Whatever you think of Plan B, the emergency contraceptive pill that the Obama administration decided to keep behind pharmacy counters rather than let women and girls buy it OTC, you have to admit that the New England Journal authors wrote a heck of a provocative sentence, after reviewing the number of scientific committees that had deemed the medication safe. (The article is by Wood, Drazen and Greene, from January 12.) After pointing out that adolescent girls can already buy lethal doses of Tylenol OTC without any questions asked, and after explaining that the only known risks of Plan B are nausea and delayed menses, they land a hard punch right on the jaw of the Obama administration:

“Any objective review makes it clear that Plan B is more dangerous to politicians than to adolescent girls.”

Ouch!

Would it be immoral for a Christian to lack faith in Tim Tebow?

Interesting to see a Catholic scholar’s take on a recent issue of a pediatric journal which discussed the ethics of caring for seventy disabled newborns. I contributed an essay, and the Catholic blogger somehow concluded that most of the contributors were atheists or agnostics.

Here is the link to the post.

See some coverage in Forbes on a debate I participated in at a recent meeting, discussing when decisions are really decisions and when nudges are really shoves.

Click here.

Angie Fagerlin—friend, colleague, and all around inspiration—just took the lead in a paper that is getting some media attention.  (She was kind enough to include me in the effort.)  The paper gives advice to cancer patients about how to make better decisions. This link shows CBS News’s take on it.  (Is “News’s” a word?)

And if you want to see the article Angie wrote, it is here.

As all of you know, my goal in life is to be a regular on Fox News. Well, anyway, here is a link to a Fox News story on happiness and all that stuff, which quotes me, and even places me back in Michigan. Let’s do the time warp . . . ?

Here are some details on a live web chat I’m having on Friday.  Feel free to send in some fun questions.

Check out a podcast I made with GovLoop, a website for government employees, in which I discuss the challenge we face in this country of overcoming partisanship.  Take a listen and let me know what you think.

You might be interested in some coverage my research team got in Qatar, for our study on oncology decision making.  (Link) Maybe one of you can translate it for me?

See a nice TV news segment from Grand Rapids Michigan last night (March 8th), that followed up on a symposium on health care rationing, where Norm Daniels (one of my heroes–a philosopher from Harvard) and I address the need to discuss how to set appropriate limits to contain health care costs. Click on my picture to link to the colloquy coverage.