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Worth Your Time: Selections from the Bioethics Library

April 11, 2023 • Posted in Blog

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

What Does It Take to Alter Our Next Generation?

March 7, 2023 • Posted in Blog

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

I have been thinking about how one generation proactively alters the succeeding one. As I contemplated this conundrum, I found myself writing a story instead of a list. That story was published as a SALVO blog piece, and the link is below. The “angsty” pirate lives in a dystopia created by childhood desire, indulgent parents, a cooperative, complicit medical-industrial complex, and a legal climate in which desire is codified into law. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Click here to read the story. Then, send any comments to us through the Contact Us feature here ...read more

A Day in the Life of a Patient

November 30, 2022 • Posted in Blog

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

30 November 2022

Her son asked if I could be there by 9:00 A.M., when the hospitalist would likely make rounds. I agreed, and made the three-hour journey on a Monday in November. My friend was the patient, and I, a visitor. What I saw in the ensuing hours made me beyond sad.

A nurse came in to “take her vitals.” That meant she wheeled in a cart with various measuring components: a wristband to measure blood pressure, a probe to take the patient’s temperature, and a pulse oximeter to measure blood oxygen content. The patient was ...read more

What We’re Reading

August 31, 2022 • Posted in Blog

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

Summer often presents us with some time to relax, rejuvenate, and read. We thought you may wish to know what we’re reading. We’d enjoy receiving your comments about any of these after you’ve read them. You can contact us here. You are welcome to share with us what you’re reading as well!

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D.:

All That Moves Us by Jay Wellons: 9780593243367 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

Irreversible Damage – The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters | Regnery Publishing

You’re Only Human | Baker Publishing Group

Joyce A. Shelton, Ph.D.:

Synthetic mouse embryos created from stem cells — without sperm, eggs, ...read more

Informed Consent: A Hazy Concept

July 22, 2022 • Posted in Blog

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

Who is He and what has he done to our children?

April 6, 2022 • Posted in Blog

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

Remember He Jiankui? He is the Chinese scientist who used CRISPR technology to edit the CCR5 gene for the HIV receptor in the genomes of human embryos. His goal was to make them HIV resistant. He reported at an international conference in 2018 that two of the edited embryos had resulted in the live births of non-identical twins, Nana and Lulu. There were also reports of a third child born in 2019. His revelations in a public forum provoked moral outrage from the scientific community. Global pressure caused Chinese authorities to suspend ...read more

Life and Choice

January 22, 2022 • Posted in Blog

Janet Liljestrand, M.D., M.A.

In 1862 Louis Pasteur performed the definitive experiment that proved even the smallest organisms, those only seen under the microscope, derived from other like organisms. (1) Life came from life. Fast forward to 1973, and Justice Blackmun, writing for the majority decision in Roe v. Wade stated “We need not resolve the difficult decision of when life begins”. (2) What was the Justice’s definition of life? The human zygote contains all it needs for cellular division–and thus growth–at the union of a living sperm and living egg. How then has its human life not begun? Yes, in ...read more

Guinea Pigs

November 10, 2021 • Posted in Blog

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

Successful xenotransplantation, animal donor to human recipient organ transfer, is the holy grail for medical doctors and scientists who study organ transplant. Why? Approximately 107,000 people are awaiting organ transplant in the US. Most will wait up to 2 to 3 years. About 17 people die per day because there are not enough organs available to meet the demand (1). Animal organs that have been genetically engineered to remove tissue molecules that cause transplant rejection would go a long way toward relieving the organ shortage.

A recently proclaimed major transplantation breakthrough attracted widespread ...read more

The Ethics of Rationing COVID-19 Vaccine for the Sickest Among Us

January 13, 2021 • Posted in Blog

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D Distinguished Fellow

We must not allow our combined COVID-19 fatigue to prevent us from asking important questions about public health ethics. At the time I am writing this essay, we are just transitioning into Phase 2 of the vaccination plan. I am sure our public health officials are doing the best they can under unprecedented circumstances, so we should give them the benefit of the doubt. But for the sake of clarity in the future, some retrospective analysis will be crucial.

For instance, in our own state, we have abandoned traditional triage ethics in favor of a purely age-based ...read more

The Prescription for Flourishing Embodiment in Public Bioethics

December 4, 2020 • Posted in Blog

 

A Book Review

C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D. Distinguished Fellow

American public bioethics does not have a sterling history because it misunderstands its most important subject, the human subject. This is the claim of a brilliant new book by O. Carter Snead, the Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture and professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.

In What it Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Harvard, 2020), Snead offers a genealogy of American public bioethics. Public bioethics, as contrasted with clinical bioethics, is the realm of human subjects research where, instead ...read more