Currently viewing the category:
"Health Care"
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. [...]
The Power of Placebo
By Kyle Munkittrick On January 8, 2012 · Leave a Comment · In Body, Drugs, Health Care, Medicine, Mind
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 [...]
The Irish Council for Bioethics has a well designed and marvelously informative pdf entitled “Euthanasia: Your Body, Your Death, Your Choice?” It’s one of the most lucid explanations of the big questions in three pages I’ve seen. A sample:
It’s here. You cannot stop a man that smart. You can only hope his reason penetrates the stammering fears of others. Pratchett on Peter, the subject of the documentary.
“So then is it a good thing? And you are trying to resolve these things. Because it is a good thing, I think, that in [...]
In my most recent SNF post, I argue that a lot of our concerns over enhancement come from a strange acceptance of so-so health care:
But here’s the interesting thing: neither the US nor the UK have regulations in place for prescription pharmaceuticals that are not therapeutic. Drugs that don’t cure an illness but [...]
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
