I recently spoke with a Washington Post reporter about a troubling practice. Physicians convince their patients to sign letters to influence public policies the patients often don’t understand. Here is the beginning of that piece. Check it out: A proposal to sharply cut a drug discount program that many hospitals rely on drew some 1,400…
A recent study of men with early-stage prostate cancer found no difference in 10-year death rates, regardless of whether their doctors actively monitored the cancers for signs of growth or eradicated the men’s cancers with surgery or radiation. What does this study mean for patients? Based on research we have conducted on prostate cancer decision-making,…
The right to die has played a critical role in the development of the doctor/patient relationship. It was families clamoring for the right to allow their loved ones to die who forced the world to recognize that physicians’ medical decisions aren’t just medical decisions, but involve enormous value judgments. In 1975, Karen Ann Quinlan’s loving…
A recent Gallup poll asked people how they would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in a wide range of professions. Not surprisingly, Congress didn’t come out very well on this poll, rating even below car salespeople on these traits. Among highly paid professionals, physicians came out on top. Physicians are still highly…
I recently spoke with Audiey Kao, an ethics expert at the American Medical Association. Our conversation has been released as a podcast. We talked about quite a few things, but the part I enjoyed the most involved a gentle disagreement about healthcare profits. Here is a link to the podcast: AMA Journal of Ethics Podcast:…
The forty million dollar Gulfstream jet landed at Memphis International airport in the early morning hours, its schedule hastily arranged earlier that day from Northern California, where the flight originated. Waiting on the tarmac was Dr. James Eason, head of transplant surgery at Methodist University Hospital, who planned on whisking the passenger to the operating…
Last summer, Facebook received terrible press for running experiments on its users, adjusting the proportion of happy and unhappy posts at the top of people’s news feeds to see how that effected their moods. Shortly after that controversy surfaced, OK-Cupid founder Christian Rudder proudly announced “we experiment on human beings.” He unabashedly admitted that he…
It is an oft recited paradox that Americans like the men or women representing them in Congress, while hating Congress as a whole. In fact, respect for Congress is near all-time lows. In what has to be seen as a bad sign for the medical profession, people’s attitudes towards physicians are beginning to look downright…
Several people have asked me lately whether I think that death row inmates should be able to donate their organs before they die. In effect, to commit suicide through organ donation. Culminating in donation of the heart, of course. They are going to be executed anyway, why not bring benefits to others en route? I see…
Quite a while ago, I was co-author on a New England Journal of Medicine article arguing that HIV-positive patients, stable on anti-retro viral therapy, were now healthy enough to qualify as organ transplant recipients. Nevertheless, this practice remains controversial, as you can see from this story published by Al Jazeera America, telling a tragic tale of…