[Ed. Note: On Friday, May 2 and Saturday, May 3, 2014, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted its 2014 annual conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.” This is an installment in our series of live blog posts from the event; video will be available later in the summer on our website.] By Matthew L Baum In this next installment of today’s live-blogging of…
By Matthew L Baum At least since the publication of the President’s Commission on Bioethics’ report in 2003, “Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness”, there has been an ongoing debate about the ethics of using drugs to modify emotional memories. Rather than focus on the Hollywood-type total memory erasure featured in the Eternal Sunshine…
By Matthew L Baum I have written previously on this blog about morally modifying technologies (here and here), which by definition work no better than existing technologies but enable the side-stepping of a moral tension associated with the first technology. Generic pharmaceuticals are a particularly well-known and widely endorsed form of morally modifying technology: they have…
By Matthew L Baum This past Sunday, a group of researchers reported in the journal, Nature Medicine, a preliminary technique that uses variation in blood levels of 10 fats to predict the likelihood that elderly individuals would develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer’s Disease in the following 2-3 years. The sample size was small…
By Matthew L Baum In my last blog post, I suggested that we consider incentivizing scientists and engineers to develop technologies that side-step ethical dilemmas entangling certain current technologies. I highlighted that these morally modifying technologies 1) neither resolve a moral debate nor do they take a side, 2) usually do not function empirically better…
By Matthew L Baum When we consider our society’s tough moral questions, like whether it is acceptable to use embryonic stem cells for research and medicine, we often look towards governmental leaders, policy makers, lawyers, and ethicists to find solutions. But should we look more often towards engineers? This week in Nature, a research group…
By Matthew L Baum Recently in the New England Journal of Medicine, D.S. Jones described the history of a dangerous new technology, the detrimental health effects of which had clinicians very worried. That technology was the automobile. While the public health concern spanned from inactivity to new maladies like “automobile knee”, by far the greatest concern…
By Matthew L Baum There are many ways to drive medicine forward. One is to work to remove economic, political, or geographic barriers to accessing care, and thus aid those whose suffering can be assuaged but is not being so. Another is to work to develop treatments for types of suffering poorly eased (or addressed)…
By Matthew L Baum I recently saw someone walk into a signpost (amazingly, one that signalled ‘caution pedestrians’); by the angle and magnitude that his body rebounded, I estimated that this probably really hurt. What I had witnessed was a danger of walking under the influence of a smart phone. Because this man lacked the…
By Matthew L Baum “Examining the intersection of law and health care, biotech & bioethics” – the subtitle of the Bill of Health blog. I approach this intersection like many of my fellow students: outfitted with the tools and spectacles of a specific discipline. Whether that is health law, policy, medicine, engineering, philosophy, genetics, or…
