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"Medicine"
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, [...]
From Nature:
[Takanori Takebe, a stem-cell biologist at Yokohama City University in Japan,] told how his team grew the organ using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), created by reprogramming human skin cells to an embryo-like state. The researchers placed the cells on growth plates in a specially designed medium; after nine days, analysis showed [...]
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 [...]
Larry Smarr is trying to save your life:
Larry sees medicine as a stubborn holdout. Current efforts to reform the system—for instance, the Obama administration’s initiative to digitize all health records by 2014—are just toes in the water. Medicine has barely begun to take advantage of the million-fold increase in the amount of data [...]
Should we force feed those with anorexia? Sounds like a question for the text books.
I have no idea why the original headline references a TV remote control (notoriously shitty user-interfaces) , but the article gets it right: digitizing and technologizing medicine doesn’t help anybody if the software and hardware isn’t human-friendly. And who do you think the article cites as the user-friendly paragon?
Of course, Apple is the [...]
The X Prize Foundation has plunked down another gauntlet, this one to the tune of $2.25 million with the help of Nokia, to drag healthcare kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The objective? A portable, affordable, accurate, and comprehensive sensor suite able to constantly and unobtrusively measure every aspect of health [...]
Michael Wolff says what must be said: in our desperate attempt to advance medicine we have created a population of millions who suffer because we will not let them die – every life is worth ending.
This is not anomalous; this is the norm.
The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying [...]
Searing, intense, personal account of being mother to a child with Tay-Sachs, perhaps the archetypal disease used for discussing wrongful life. Emily Rapp’s take on prenatal testing is the opposite of abstract. Read it all:
That it is possible to hold this paradox as part of my daily reality points to the reductive and [...]
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
