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"Medicine"
Are Exoskeletons “Ableist?”
By Kyle Munkittrick On January 22, 2012 · Leave a Comment · In Bioethics, Body, Medicine, Prosthetics, Rights
In a word, no.
Over at Cyborgology (a blog I am amazed I didn’t discover sooner, given its sister site is Sociological Images) Jenny Davis attempts to figure out if the assistive devices built by Ekso Bionics are “ableist” or if they represent genuine progress. She makes a pretty good [...]
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 [...]
They are compliments. Consider the digital 3-D cadaver system being used by NYU Medical:
In the N.Y.U. lab, Chana Rich, a 21-year-old first-year student from Fairfield, Conn., dissected an older, female cadaver. But the dead woman had undergone a number of surgeries during her lifetime, and her body was now missing its appendix, spleen [...]
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 [...]
Iraq, Afghanistan, and the decade or so of not-war-but-still-war that’s been going on has not killed large number of soldiers (relative to past conflicts), but has maimed a huge percentage of those returning home from battle. Those returning previously faced few options to repair their injuries. Now, there looks to be some real [...]
Anthony Gregory, a researcher with the Independent Institute, makes the case in The Atlantic for legalizing organ sales:
Several years ago, transplant surgeon Nadley Hakim at St. Mary’s Hospital in London pointed out that “this trade is going on anyway, why not have a controlled trade where if someone wants to donate a kidney for [...]
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 [...]
Imagine the following:
Tomorrow, a bureaucrat in Berlin discovers a massive cache of documents, videos, and photos from a secret Nazi science lab. The lab was charged with the most heinous and unethical of Nazi research programs wherein human test subjects were abused and violated in the most inhuman ways possible. [...]
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
