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"Health Care"
Stanton Peele makes a compelling case that our obsession with being “treated” for every minor malady reflects our abject terror in the face of clinically based recommendations to cut back on testing.
American health care costs are driving America into the ground. These costs stand at from 2-3:1 compared with other nations (like the UK), [...]
The Stem Cell Hope and Our Indefinitely Delayed Future
By Kyle Munkittrick On June 29, 2012 · In Bioethics, Book, Government, Health Care, Law, Medicine, Rights
Alice Park’s new book The Stem Cell Hope, convinced me it is time to retire, “Where is my jetpack!?” once and for all. After reading her new book, Park will have you screaming, “Where are my stem cells?” from every rooftop.
Jetpacks are a puerile toy that we all know would be impractical, deadly, [...]
A reader commenting on a home birthing thread on Andrew Sullivan’s the Dish sums up how medical regulations can fail better than I’ve heard before:
The tragedy to me in this whole story is that once again a medical debate is being left to the extremes. Screams of “death panels!” drowned out any fair [...]
Ah yes, another law drafted by the “the government is evil and should be small except for when legislating about sex, drugs, and procreation” GOP has failed.
And did they really want it to pass? No – it’s a wedge issue designed to give them something to point to during the election cycle. “See, [...]
The best hospitals are now competing not only to have the best medical teams, but the best amenities:
The younger Mr. Frehse contrasted the unit’s mouth-watering menu with the “inedible food” his father faced when he was treated on the non-elite second floor. “Here he has mushroom risotto with heirloom tomatoes,” he said.
The [...]
Data driven health care gets a new input source:
For the system, Proteus has designed sensors called ‘ingestible event markers’, which can be taken with pills or incorporated directly into medicines as part of the manufacturing process. In this system, the sensors will be embedded in a placebo to be taken alongside a medicine. [...]
Fertility, depression, Parkinson’s, fitness, hunger levels, pain, and asthma are a few of the things the inert wonder drug can help treat.
Why did the placebo work—even after patients were told they weren’t getting real medicine? Expectations play a role, Dr. Kaptchuk says. Even more likely is that patients were conditioned to a positive [...]
The placebo effect is well known. Tell someone, “Hey, this pill will make your headache go away” and, though the pill is just a sugar pill and has no pain mediating qualities, will indeed make the headache go away in some small percentage of the population. The placebo effect is the power of suggestion [...]
Doctors have found what is potentially a new way to determine if a patient who appears to be in a permanent vegetative state is actually conscious:
The research team, led by Damian Cruse and Adrian M. Owen of the University of Western Ontario, gave simple instructions to 16 people said to be “vegetative”: each [...]
I am an advocate of pursuing anti-aging medicine. What does that mean? It means I support research that would create medical techniques and pharmaceuticals that would prevent age-related health issues, like muscle wasting, mental decay, lowered immune response, and heart disease. It also means I support the right of someone to refuse certain medical treatments based [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
