Seeing Patients Through Medical AI

Blog, C. Ben Mitchell, Emerging Technologies, Medicine & Health, uncategorized / /

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D.

Distinguished Fellow

The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being integrated within the practice of medicine in leaps and bounds. Fields such as radiology, telehealth, and emergency medicine are increasingly implementing AI in diagnostics and treatment. Doubtless, AI will eventually enhance patient care, prognostics, and clinical practice generally. But at what cost to the physician-patient relationship and trust?

Keeping the patient in view as a whole person is already a challenge for contemporary medicine. Patients are often objectified by their body parts, disease, or location. “That’s the ovarian cancer in ...read more

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Worth Your Time: Selections from the Bioethics Library

Blog, C. Ben Mitchell / /

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture

 

The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession by Farr Curlin, MD and Christopher Tollefsen

Written by a palliative care physician/ethicist and a philosopher, The Way of Medicine is both diagnostic and prescriptive. Curlin and Tollefsen begin by showing readers why medicine is in crisis. At the heart of the crisis is the “provider of services model” (PSM) as the role of the physician which has not only eroded the profession qua a profession, but has helped to make medicine just another consumer good. Physicians are merely providers and patients ...read more

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Informed Consent: A Hazy Concept

Blog, C. Ben Mitchell, End of Life, Other Voices / /

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture

We’re all too familiar with those awkward television commercials for drugs whose names cannot be pronounced because they have too many consonants. To be fair, drug manufacturers have run out of eloquent ways to combine the letters of the alphabet, so they just string them together as best they can. But beyond the alphabet soup, the television voice recites a sometimes-arresting list of possible complications of taking the drug: dizziness, insomnia, tiredness—or the even more arresting—intense sexual or gambling urges and explosive diarrhea, which hopefully do not occur simultaneously! The ...read more

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Human Dignity — A First Principle

Blog, C. Ben Mitchell, United States / /

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture

After the horrific human rights abuses of Nazi Germany were revealed at the end of World War II, an international tribunal was held in Nuremberg to try those who were responsible for the Holocaust. Hard on the heels of those Nuremberg Trials (1945-46) followed the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which enshrined the notion of human dignity, declaring that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of ...read more

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A Tale of Two Data Scientists

Blog, C. Ben Mitchell, COVID-19, United Kingdom, United States / /

 

Neil Ferguson, Ph.D. Infamous Graph Youyang Gu

 

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A. Executive Director

It was a long year ago (March 2020) that a dire prediction was issued by a group at Imperial College London (UK) regarding the possible effects of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. The model predicted more than 500,000 UK deaths, and >2.2 million deaths in the U.S. by summer if no action were taken. One of the data scientists issuing that proclamation was Neil Ferguson, Ph.D. He and his group advised the government that “in the UK and US context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire ...read more

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