Mr. B in Solitary Confinement
Janet Liljestrand, M.D., M.A.
Mr. B was in solitary confinement. His crime? Candida auris, a fungus which is particularly difficult to treat, grew from one of his cultures taken during a fever while a patient in a nursing home. Referred to as an opportunistic infection, the average person is unlikely to become ill with C. auris, but those in poor health or with an immune deficiency are susceptible. The CDC has recommended that a patient who has a culture that is positive for C. auris, regardless of the site of the culture, be in isolation for the duration of the patient’s ...read more
Can We Deal with the Truth?
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
Two things have happened in recent weeks that should get our attention. Both are truth claims, and come from opposite ends of the cultural and political spectra.
First of all, what is truth? The Free Dictionary is helpful: truth is defined as “Conformity to fact or actuality.” That which conforms to reality is truth. An example often bandied about is my action based on what I believe about gravity. That is, if I believe that the gravitational pull of the earth does not exist (is not true), then I should be able to step out of ...read more
Permanent or Irreversible: What Difference Does It Make?
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
A number of years ago, I was out of town when we had significant flooding at home. There was some leaking of water into the basement, and one of our then-teenage sons decided to make sure I would be aware of where exactly the leaks had appeared. He used a hot pink permanent marker to delineate the problem on the drywall for me. When my husband arrived home at the end of a full day, he became rather “excited” about our son’s decision. Thankfully, an older son found a solution to remove evidence of the ...read more
23andMe: The Gift That Keeps on Giving
23andMe is a leading provider of personalized genetic testing (screen shot of product above). For $229 and a test tube of spit, anyone can have their DNA analyzed and receive direct reports on their ancestry, genetic traits, health risks and pre-dispositions, carrier risks and more. Consumers are also invited to share their genetic information with relatives and healthcare professionals and they can choose to have their “de-identified” data shared with pharmaceutical and medical research companies for the development of new drugs and treatments. About 80% of consumers agree to share their personal ...read more
Open Letter to Health Care Professionals: We Have a Problem
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
To Health Care Professionals: We have a problem. Our health care systems typically have multiple levels of health care “providers” who see and treat patients with or without physician input or oversight. The interposition of electronic medical records and automated systems add another layer of complexity to the health care arena. Young trainees — medical students and others — have, due to various pandemic policies, been “trained” online. The distance between health care professional and patient has increased by many of these factors. The problem we health care professionals have is with the second word ...read more
Surgical Castration Decision by Surrogates
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
After evaluating the situation and weighing the options for months, my husband and I took our two-year-old Golden Retriever to the veterinarian for surgery. “Rudy” has been with us for two years, and is fully grown. He is a loving dog, who is obsessed with playing ball in the backyard – between petting sessions, of course. He has marked his territory in the great outdoors for more than a year; of late, he has decided to claim some of the indoor space as well. That is a no-no: something we will not tolerate.
Nonetheless, we both ...read more
Subsidizing Desire
D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director
Philosophy Professor Timothy F. Murphy and medical student Kelsey Mumford recently published in the AMA Journal of Ethics a paper on the possibility of subsidizing uterine transplantation — for transwomen (biological males) and transmen (biological females).
The authors posit that government subsidy for expensive uterine transplants could apply to a number of persons identifying as
Transwomen “who want to gestate their own children” Transwomen who don’t want to gestate children but want a uterus “to consolidate their identities” Transmen “who want to gestate their own children” Males (“cisgender men”) who want to “gestate children of their own”The authors raise the ...read more
My Life, My Death, My Choice … or NOT
Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University
As we emerge from the shadow of a worldwide pandemic that forced society to seek safety in unprecedented government control, we are finding that governments are now unwilling to hand back the reins to the populace. New laws, hastily passed, are designed to limit individual freedoms and solidify the power of policy makers over our lives. Frequently, we are told that these laws are for own good and/or the good of our society. Those who disagree are often marginalized, cancelled, or even arrested, accused of obstructing needed liberal social change. Hard earned ...read more
The Written Word
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture
“A Call to Christian Academics Regarding Medical and Technological Ethics.”
Larry Locke is a Professor and Associate Dean of the McLane College of Business at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor and a Research Fellow of LCC International University. This insightful essay issues a call for Christian academics to invest themselves in the medical ethical questions of today. “Now is the time,” he concludes, “for Christian academics and Christian ethicists to apply themselves and all their skill to these and other looming questions. Our generation has been gifted with an ...read more
Worth Your Time: Selections from the Bioethics Library
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture
Adam Kirsch, The Revolt Against Humanity: Imaging a Future Without Us (Columbia Global Reports, 2023)
In this dystopian non-fiction work, Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, claims that the future will be better off without human beings. As he puts it in the introduction, “the premise of the book is that the revolt against humanity is a real and significant phenomenon even if it is “just” an idea, and its predictions of a future without us never comes true.” The revolt against humanity is, as he puts it, “a spiritual ...read more
