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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Bringing Light to a Culture of Death

Blog, End of Life, Medicine & Health, Other Voices / /

caption id=”attachment_1852″ align=”aligncenter” width=”300″] Stock image[/caption]   by Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University In contemporary western culture, autonomy (self will, personal choice) is the supreme value. This value is no better exemplified than in the promotion of self-controlled death through legalization of physician assisted suicide. Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) means a physician provides a patient-requested lethal medication that their patient can then use to end his or her life. Most recently, we have witnessed the legalization of PAS, also termed Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD), to ever ballooning proportions in Canada and now in ...read more

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WHO\’s in Charge? WHAt\’s in Store?

Blog, Medicine & Health, WHO / /
by D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.

Executive Director

The World Health Organization (WHO), through the governing World Health Assembly (WHA) has proposed changes to the International Health Regulations (IHR) that eliminate human dignity, human rights, and freedoms of persons. The Article by Article Compilation of Proposed Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) submitted by States Parties in the context of Decision WHA75(9)2 shows the changes, noted by strikethroughs, underlining, and bold text. A strikethrough deletes existing text, and proposed new text is underlined and in bold font. Many changes are afoot. Only a few are considered here.

One change to Article 1 of the document (see NOTE 1 below) ...read more

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EctoLife: A Cautionary Tale

Blog, Emerging Technologies, Engineering Humans, Other Voices / /

 

Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University

In the December 2022 TN-CBC newsletter article entitled Déjà vu all over again, D. Joy Riley drew our attention to the parallels between the recently released YouTube video EctoLife: The world’s first artificial womb facility, and the fake publicity for the movie GATTACA 25 years ago. The new video, while actually conceptual, presents ectogenesis, the complete development of a baby in an artificial womb, as a current reality. Once again, a number of viewers were fooled. Unfortunately, it is perhaps more realistic than we dare to think. In a revealing interview by Beau Davidson with the Ectolife ...read more

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Déjà vu all over again

Blog, Emerging Technologies / /

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

The past couple of weeks have reminded me of the quote attributed to Yogi Berra, “It\’s Deja Vu All Over Again.”

Twenty-five years ago, the film, Gattaca, was released. One of the fake ads for the movie is pictured here. Thousands of people responded to the advertisements for the film, thinking it was the real deal.

In the past two weeks, multiple people have sent me the link to a new video, EctoLife: Concept Unveiled for the World’s First Artificial Womb Facility. Some are concerned that this is happening now; comments found online show a significant ...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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GATTACA: 25 Years On

Blog, Born Human, Emerging Technologies / /

Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology Emerita Trinity International University

(Editor’s Note: The Tennessee Center for Bioethics & Culture screened GATTACA at the end of June at the international bioethics conference held by the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity at Trinity International University. Dr. Shelton presented opening remarks, which, lightly edited, are presented here.)

The movie, GATTACA, is entertaining to watch as is, but is also rife with symbolism and subtle—and some not so subtle—philosophical messages. 25 years on: it has proved to be prescient in a number of ways.

GATTACA depicts a dystopian world in which there is a new type of social ...read more

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I Should Have Read More History

Blog, Medicine & Health / /

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

As a teenager, I decided I wanted to be a physician — to help people. I also naively thought that medicine was apolitical. I should have read more history. If I had, I might have come across the story of Ignác Fülöp Semmelweis.

Semmelweis was born to Hungarian parents slightly more than 200 years ago, in 1818. Although he began to study law, he ended up graduating from medical school in 1844. Other plans of his changed as well. When he did not land a position in internal medicine, he spent four extra months training to ...read more

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If Monkeys Could Talk

Blog, China, Engineering Humans, Other Voices, United States / /

Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D. Professor of Biology, Trinity International University Guest Column

Recent news announcements proclaimed, with both excitement and alarm, that Tan and colleagues, scientists from China and the US, had successfully produced human-monkey hybrid embryos. (1, 2) The hybrids (also termed chimeras) were made by injecting human pluripotent stem cells from an induced pluripotent stem cell line into 132 early- stage monkey embryos. Human pluripotent stem cells have the capacity to develop into a range of tissues and cell types which ultimately form all the structures of the human body including the brain and reproductive cells (sperm and egg). (3) In ...read more

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Tennessee Legislative Update: Commercial Surrogacy and a Pot of Gold

Blog, Commercial Surrogacy, Engineering Humans, uncategorized, United States / /

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

References to pots of gold usually occur in the month of March, and involve leprechauns and rainbows. This year, pots of gold figure in at least one set of companion bills (House Bill No. 1379 and Senate Bill No. 425) the Tennessee Legislature is transforming into law. Instead of leprechauns and rainbows, though, it is the fertility physicians/clinics and “third-party reproductive care for the benefit of the enrollee(s).” The pots of gold are to be provided by “insurance companies,” which means, of course, “the insured,” which would include all of us who pay insurance ...read more

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