some bioethics to think about
Last week I had some pretty interesting classes. On Tuesday my bioethics proseminar discussion was about confidentiality in medicine. Most of the debate for the last 40ish years has been based around the case Tarasoff vs. The Regents of the University of California. Basically, a man was seeing a psychiatrist and told him that he was going to kill his ex-girlfriend. Patients say things like that all the time, but this time the patient actually killed the girl. SO, the parents of the girl took the doctor and his superior to court because they did not follow through with their duty to warn. Good points have been made on both sides, but do you think doctors have a duty to warn if they have strong reason to believe another person's life is in danger? It's a lot harder to give a clear answer on this than you might think!
On Wednesday my Bioethics and National Security class, which is awesome, had a guest speaker, Griff Trotter, talk about the ethics of coercion in disaster based medicine. The talk was pretty interesting, but the dinner afterwards was a lot more fun. The department treats guest speakers to dinner at nice restaurants around campus and invites a few students to come along. Dinner conversation ranged from topics related to his talk to mountain climbing, naked runs, narcissism, fraternizing with students, hippies and his experiences as a military doc in disaster medicine (always makes for some cool stories). The philosophy discussion at dinner was really fantastic and intense, but it was nice to see such a down-to-earth guy.
My Thursday class, pharmaceutical ethics, was centered around medical writing, ghost writing publications and academics taking money from industry. Ghost writing publications for peer-reviewed journals is a huge problem which just adds to my lack of trust of peer-reviewed journals. An example would be a pharm company writing an article about the effectiveness of one of their drugs and then paying an expert in the field to sign their name to the authorship line (that wouldn't be biased at all). Even the big time medical journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine are not immune to these types of cheats, although they have done much to mitigate this problem. SO, next time you say "well it's from a peer-reviewed journal," remember that that doesn't mean it's perfectly authoritative.
There's a healthy dose of bioethics for you for the week.