Tag Archive | Ethics
Finding the Muslim View on Medicine
Muslims are the fastest-growing religious minority in the United States, with over 7 million Americans declaring themselves as followers of Islam and more than 2,000 mosques nationwide. But in spite of the numbers, little data has been collected about American Muslims’ beliefs about health and disease, or their experience in the U.S. health care system. […]
Sexual Identity, Health, and Stigma in India
Last November, a barrier was broken in the prolific Bollywood film industry of India. A film called Dunno Y featured the first on-screen male-male kiss – a provocative scene in a country that only the year before repealed a law making homosexuality illegal. Many tagged the film as India’s version of Brokeback Mountain, a controversial […]
Medical Ethics Summer School
It has been a couple months since the end of the spring quarter, and the with it the end of many of the Medical Center’s weekly lecture series. But a recent batch of videos posted to the website of the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics brought a whiff of the school year to the dog […]
When Academia is a Family Business
There’s something quaint and charming about a family business, where multiple generations work shoulder to shoulder to keep an enterprise afloat. But when the business in question is academia and the salaries are paid by tax dollars, suddenly keeping it in the family carries the stink of nepotism. In the public universities of Italy, it’s […]
Linkage 7/15: Chest Scan Caution & Under the Influence of Flags
Cancer used to be a black box, a disease that physicians could only monitor through surgical biopsies and indirect measures. But for the last thirty years, the use of computed tomography imaging, better known as CT scans, has allowed oncologists and cancer researchers to keep close watch on the growth or shrinkage of a tumor […]
Can a Clinical Trial Go to Seed?
In most clinical trials the targets are patients, volunteers with a disease who sign up for a study to help advance medical knowledge and perhaps lead to better treatments for what ails them. But this week a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine revealed that sometimes the real targets are not so much the […]
The Global Health Gap: Why Fight It?
The final question of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics seminar series on health disparities was a seemingly obvious query that had gone unasked and unanswered the entire year: who is responsible for fixing the problem? For the self-selecting audience that had attended the lectures all year, the question may have seemed irrelevant – […]
The Stressful Truth Hidden Inside a Reverse Disparity
Over the year-long discussion of health disparities in the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics seminar series, the health gaps presented between American whites and blacks have been predominantly a one-way street. On nearly every health measure – from infant mortality to diabetes to cardiovascular disease – higher rates are observed for African-Americans. But there’s […]
Fighting Disparities During Segregation
Reducing health disparities in the United States has been a top priority for our health care system in these early years of the 21st century. But efforts to narrow the health gap between black and white patients go much farther back, to the start of the previous century when the first African-Americans were graduating from […]
Hospitalists, Specialists, and a New Model of Care
In the Norman Rockwell past, patients had one doctor who followed them from home to clinic to hospital, managing their health care over a significant portion of their lives. That sort of doctor-patient relationship in today’s medical world seems about as outdated as a family gathered around the fireplace listening to the radio. Now, patients […]
