Archive | Page 2

“Futile care” is a bioethics theory in which doctors are authorized to refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment based on their belief about the quality of a patient’s life. It can be cruel — and on occasion, mistaken. Prominent medical journals usually support futile-care theory. But the New England Journal of Medicine just published a contrary column by a compassionate doctor who rejected that approach in order to keep hope alive for his terminally ill patient and her family. The oncologist, Dr. David N. Korones, placed a young terminally ill cancer patient named Zoha in an experimental drug trial. At first all seemed well, then her condition worsened. From, “The Last Dose”: Although the rules of the trial allowed Zoha to remain Read More ›

There are some 91,000 people with severe kidney disease waiting for transplants. Alas, cadaver and living donors are insufficient to fill the need. That has some well-meaning activists pushing to increase the number of available kidneys by legalizing organ-selling. The psychiatrist and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Sally Satel is probably the premier proponent of this approach. She has skin in the game, having received two living-donor organs. Writing in the Free Press, Satel promotes a bill that would allow kidney suppliers to become vendors and receive a tax credit. From, “I Had Two Kidney Transplants: I Want Donors to Get Paid.” But now, legislation is on the table that would save these patients’ lives while eliminating those concerns. On Read More ›

The editors of medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet are ruining the once venerable reputations of their publications by continually publishing hard-left-wing polemics about controversial political issues — such as race relations, gun regulation, and climate change — in the guise of deeming them matters of public health.

These woke publications also repeatedly advocate about highly contestable health issues from the progressive side — such as insisting that so-called gender-affirming care is medically necessary and the scientifically settled means of treating gender-confused children.

Political and cultural advocacy in these publications is sometimes so strident that editors seem almost more invested in ideological advocacy and promoting woke narratives than publishing scientifically enlightening papers. That’s self-destructive because it corrodes trust in the objectivity and expertise of the publications and calls into question whether well-documented papers that cut against the ideological grain would be published at all.

Science writer Matt Ridley has always had a reductionist view of the moral importance of human beings. He’s at it again in a piece about the likelihood that scientists will eventually find proof of life beyond this world. Ridley thinks that chances of such a momentous discovery are good. No argument there. The universe is so vast and inhabitable (as we understand the term) planets so numerous, it would be truly remarkable if life only existed here. But Ridley thinks that finding proof of such life would dent human exceptionalism: It will be a fifth ‘Copernican moment’ when extra-terrestrial life is finally discovered: scientists putting yet another dent in human self-importance. They showed that the earth orbits the sun, not vice versa (Nikolaus Read More ›

Homelessness has become a crisis in the United States. We live in the richest country in the world, and yet one can drive down main thoroughfares of our most prosperous cities and be confronted with tent encampments lining streets, squalor, open-air drug markets, and destitute people begging. The crisis is multifaceted as it is seemingly intractable. What is the role Read More ›

The Canadian health care system is melting down — and yet the country still embraces radical euthanasia policies. Here’s a current example: A woman injured in an auto accident has waited nearly two years for a consultation with a spinal surgeon — despite now having to use a wheelchair. So, she wants to come to the U.S. for a simple diagnosis, which will cost $40,000! From the CBC story: A London woman injured in a car crash says she’s left with no choice but to pay to see a doctor in the United States after waiting almost two years for a diagnosis from an Ontario spine surgeon. Sydney Gesualdi was rear-ended at a red light in July 2023, after which she was initially diagnosed Read More ›

New Jersey has started an admirable program to prevent suicide. From the NJ.com story: A new state program will send trained mental health professionals and people with lived experience to respond to adults who contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The Mobile Crisis Outreach Teams, which consist of one peer and one professional, will be dispatched through the state’s 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline centers to help adults struggling with mental illness and substance use disorder, without the need for police. “Today’s announcement underscores that — in New Jersey — help is truly only a phone call or text message away,” Gov. Phil Murphy said in a statement announcing the program’s launch. That’s great. Too bad the effort won’t apply to all suicides. You see, assisted suicide Read More ›

The New England Journal of Medicine is pushing progressive politics in the guise of protecting health, again, this time publishing an article that attacks the fossil fuel industry. From, “Clearing the Smoke on Fossil Fuels — The Health Imperative for a Countermarketing Campaign”:

International Energy Agency analyses show that expected growth in global electricity demand can be met without any new fossil-fuel extraction; a recent comprehensive analysis concludes that there is a “large consensus” across all published studies that developing new oil and gas fields is “incompatible” with the target established by the Paris Agreement of limiting global warming to a maximum of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its reckless expansion of oil and gas extraction and production.

No, sufficient energy can’t be generated without fossil fuels — especially without a massive switch to nuclear power — and that problem may be intractable. Most renewable energy methods favored by the green crowd are weather-dependent. If the wind doesn’t blow, windmills don’t turn. If the sun doesn’t come out, solar energy generation is reduced. The Germans have even coined a word for the energy crisis caused there by this phenomenon: dunkelflaute, or “dark doldrum.”

Good news out of the U.K. on the gender ideology front. The country’s highest court has ruled that “sex” discrimination means the biological meaning of the term and cannot be conflated with subjective feelings about “gender.” From the AP story: The U.K. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a woman is someone born biologically female, excluding transgender people from the legal definition in a long-running dispute between a feminist group and the Scottish government. The court said the unanimous ruling shouldn’t be seen as victory by one side, but several women’s groups that supported the appeal celebrated outside court and hailed it as a major win in their effort to protect spaces designated for women. Excellent. The ruling is commonsensical from a legal Read More ›

Peter Singer, the internationally influential emeritus bioethics professor from Princeton, is known as a moral philosopher — which in his case is an oxymoron. Not only has he repeatedly endorsed the moral propriety of infanticide, but he has also yawned at bestiality and suggested experimenting on cognitively disabled people rather than animals if they are not “persons,” among other ethically depraved opinions. Singer and another philosophy professor — Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek — just took to the opinion pages of the New York Times to endorse geriatric suicide. It seems a noted 90-year-old psychologist named Daniel Kahneman committed assisted suicide last year at one of Switzerland’s death clinics. Kahneman wasn’t seriously ill or debilitated but feared the infirmities that he believed Read More ›