Takeaway message: “Having a home test kit for HIV is a bit like relying on a bathroom scale in the battle against obesity.” Surely bathroom scales are part of the puzzle for obesity, but a very very small one indeed.

To read more, click here.…

JOURNAL RELATIONSHIPS

No financial relationship exists or ever existed between AJOB and Purdue Pharmaceuticals or any pharmaceutical company.…

Summer Johnson McGee, PhD…

Finally! She has seen the light! But wait, didn’t she already say this?…

The cafeteria will serve only “Green Eggs and Ham”.  ”Hop on Pop” will be the diagnosis for Sam I am. The hospital ethicists will argue, “If I Ran The Zoo”… And the star-bellied Sneetches will room together whether they have one star, no stars or two.

(For a much longer and more creative set of rhymes and more detail about this story, click here.)

Summer Johnson McGee, PhD

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According to American Medical News, 2/3rds of state medical boards are now conducting criminal background checks on their members. The goal? Physicians with a criminal record can “be denied a license, have restrictions placed on their practice or face no repercussions, depending on the will of the board in a particular state.”

Furthermore, AAMC has suggested since 2006 that all medical school applicants have criminal background checks and now 102 or 137 run those checks as part of the admissions process.…

Kevin O’Rourke, O.P., J.C.D., S.T.M., Dominican priest, canon lawyer, and health care ethicist died on Wednesday.  He is one of the seminal figures in Roman Catholic health care ethics in the United States. He is the author of numerous articles but his best-known publications are text books, especially a co-authored work (with Benedict Ashley, O.P.) published by Georgetown University Press, Health Care Ethics: A Theological Analysis, fourth ed. (2007). He has been a leader in promoting respect for patients and their families to refuse unwanted and burdensome treatment at the end of life.…

Dr. Dukan, under ethics investigation for some of his practices such making too much money off of his diet plan, say French officials, and ignoring the ethics rule that “doctors must consider the impact of their comments on the public”.…

In this issue Samia Hurst and Nicolas Tavaglione discuss when it is permissible for physicians to lie on behalf of their patients. For example, in cases where insurance coverage is key to gaining access to needed therapy, a physician may, rightfully on Tavaglione and Hurst’s view, bend the truth to ensure that the patient has access to care.…

Daniel S. Goldberg

Daniel S. Goldberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioethics & Interdisciplinary Studies in the Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University.  He holds a B.A. with honors in philosophy from Wesleyan University, and received his J.D.…

Kayhan Parsi, JD, PhD

Kayhan Parsi, JD, PhD is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director at the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.  He also teaches in the medical school and serves on the ethics committee and ethics consultation service of Loyola.  He has published in a variety of areas and has interests in medical ethics education, professionalism and professional ethics, global health, media and bioethics, and the history of medicine and bioethics.  He co-edited Healing as Vocation: A Medical Professionalism Primer (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).  He has been the book review editor for the American Journal of Bioethics since 2009.…

One of our new Associate Editors is Richard Sharp, PhD of Cleveland Clinic. We selected Rich because of his scholarship in genetics, new technologies, enhancement and other cutting edge areas in bioethics.…

1. It has been claimed that the Editorial offices of AJOB were relocated to Celltex. This is false. It is a matter of public record that the offices of the journal have been and continue to be based at 3030 Post Oak Blvd.
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As our publisher, Taylor and Francis, has announced, Glenn McGee has stepped down at Editor-in-Chief of AJOB. Upon making the decision to take a position in the private sector, Glenn made a recommendation to the publisher that one of us (David Magnus, co-Editor of AJOB), be promoted to Editor in Chief. He agreed, but only on the condition that Summer Johnson McGee, then Executive Editor of AJOB, be made the co-Editor-in-Chief with him.…

Our site is now also home to all three of the journals in the AJOB family: The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), AJOB Neuroscience and AJOB Primary Research.

Visit our “Hot Topics” section to learn all you want about any given topic in bioethics including bioterrorism, organ donation and transplantation, public health and much much more.…

The culprit: hope. Yes, that’s right. Plain unabashed optimism. As one of the study authors Rebecca Pentz describes it: “When participants describe the risks and benefits of participating in the trial, they may use their descriptions to stay hopeful.” That blasted hopefulness is clouding people’s understanding of research risk and benefit.…

Newt has revived the embryo debate in Republican politics, giving bioethicists a “walk-on role” as Michael Cook explains it. How successful he will be on keeping it on the radar is another issue altogether. It is just as likely that Newt may have just been pandering to the audience at the Exciting Idlewild Baptist Church in Florida, trying to secure votes that clearly were not enough to win the Florida Primary.…

Capitalizing on the young star’s success, Helene Campbell, 20, asked him to Tweet about the Trillium Gift of Life Network to incentivize signing up for being an organ donor, says Canada’s National Post.

And shockingly, it worked.…

Can the court require her to have an abortion? Ought someone prevent Mary from having sex?

These questions and more are raised by Caplan’s provocative piece on MSNBC. To read it click here.

Summer Johnson McGee, PhD…

Parents of special needs children around the world are outraged not only for Amelia but at the notion that health care providers, even at one of the best children’s hospitals in the world, might arbitrarily decide to deny children treatment on the basis of their mental status.…

Art Caplan reminds us in his column on MSNBC.com that its good to be skinny, whether dead or alive. The negative health consequences of obesity experienced during life linger on well into death, especially for those who want to donate their bodies to science. Does this create a moral obligation to shed pounds? Perhaps. If we want medical students to have cadavers and crash-test dummies.

To read more about Art’s position on the issue, click here.

Summer Johnson McGee, PhD…

His obituary is below.

Summer Johnson McGee, PhD

Bernard Gert, Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, Emeritus, died on the evening of Saturday the 24th of December at the UNC Hospital. He was 77.
Bernard – Bernie to his friends and family – was arguably the greatest moral philosopher of the 20th century.…

But as the Cleveland Plain Dealer asked this week, “Is Obesity Cause Enough To Take Kids From Parents?” My answer is absolutely no.…

This month’s issue of The American Journal of Bioethics is now available online. Research ethics is featured prominently in this issue with Rosamond Rhodes et al arguing for a new category of research risk and an article about the recruitment of research participants.

In addition, John Lantos and William Meadow discuss the ethics of the “slow code.” Hence the picture of a snail on our November cover!

Also, this month all of this content is FREE from our publisher.…

Loewy’s life has been described as nothing short of “remarkable.” He certainly had a remarkable impact on our field.…

As Caplan explains, an IOM report released today recommended the simplification of food labels so that consumers can with a passing glance know the nutritional value (or lack thereof) in the food we eat.…

As NPR’s Booster Shots blog put it–who spends more time looking at the back of your head, neck and face on a monthly or bi-monthly basis than your hair stylist? Teaching beauty professionals to look for changes in one’s scalp, neck or face could be an easy way to integrate early detection into routine beauty regimens.…

In the October 2011 issue of AJOB, Arthur Caplan argues in his Target Article “The Use of Prisoners as Sources of Organs-An Ethically Dubious Practice” that the great demand for cadaveric organs for donation around the world does not justify harvesting them from prisoners.

To learn more about Dr. Caplan’s position, listen to his podcast from the Bioethics Channel and read his article on bioethics.net.

Summer Johnson McGee, PhD …

According to WaPo, curing the USPS’s ills could be as simple as giving its workers and retirees a new health plan, one that isn’t foisted upon them by the federal government. The Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan (FEHBP), he argues, is just too costly for the USPS.…

A question I had never considered. That is, until I read Nicolas Jackson’s interview with Penn bioethics professor, Jonathan Moreno.

Moreno was asked “Who are three people or organizations that you would put in a Hall of Fame for your field?” His answers, some of which he admits are a bit self-serving, include 3 institutions, each of which is a non-controversial choice: The Hastings Center, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown, and UPenn.

As for people in Moreno’s “Bioethics Hall of Fame”, he lists his colleagues–Art Caplan, Zeke Emanuel, and Amy Gutmann.…

The Center for Practical Bioethics is hosting a symposium and forum on the ethics of disasters on December 7 at the Kansas City Public Library-Plaza Branch. The symposium features presentations by medical professionals who were on the scene during the Hyatt Hotel disaster in Kansas City, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the tornado that ripped through Joplin, Missouri in May 2011.

Continuing education credits are available for the symposium.

At 6 pm that evening, a public forum is scheduled with Anna Pou, MD, who spent nearly a week in Memorial Hospital in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.…

Who issued this proclamation? Well, a group that might be just a tiny bit interested in raising public awareness about stem cells, CIRM (the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine).

Their call to action: “Every family knows they are one phone call or one diagnosis away from needing what stem cell research can yield for us.” –Speaker Nancy Pelosi, U.S.…

And it’s about time some country figured out that this is one of the key tools to beating the obesity epidemic.

I’ve been debating this issue with public health students since 2005 and I am so glad to finally see that someone, some country rather, has taken this point of view seriously.…

At least one researcher, as argued in last week’s Science Translational Medicine and reported in Science Daily, believes that such a moral obligation does exist. Why the duty to disclose dead dead end data?

Because although most clinical trials end because the agent fails to be effective or safe, some studies conducted by industry are halted for reasons having nothing to do with the lack of efficacy or safety.…

Vox describes the problem like this:
“Doctors are in the cross-hairs of the nation’s politics more than ever. We’re all being asked to achieve more with less. We must cope with nightmare scenarios precipitated by cracks in the social and healthcare infrastructure so often these days that medical schools insist students become effective patient advocates as well as healers.…

But when I read today on the WSJ Health Blog that nearly 200 drugs are unavailable or in short supply around the US, I began to wonder why there hasnt been significant public outcry about this.…

But who is responsible for this tidal wave of obese children, really? It’s hard not to claim that parents, who are the providers of sustenance and the environment in which children learn about healthy (or unhealthy) eating, hold some of the responsibility for overweight and obese children.…

However, in most of these cases described above, the celebrity-cum-advocate has been effected by the condition themselves, have spent a significant amount of time dealing with the condition, and as a result are knowledgeable about the current state of scientific and medical research.…

To read Art’s take on this issue, click here.

Summer Johnson McGee, PhD…