Secret History: Return of the Black Death Channel 4, 7-8pm In 1348 the Black Death swept through London, killing people within days of the appearance of their first symptoms. Exactly how many died, and why, has long been a mystery. This Secret History documentary follows experts as they pick through the evidence and reveal why the plague killed on such a scale. And they ask, what might be coming next?

Medscape

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/pdf/acc-aha-2005-guideline-update-for-the-diagnosis-and-4hik65ngbe.pdf

ACC/AHA 2005 Guideline Update for the Diagnosis and Management of Chronic Heart Failure in the Adult

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

ACC/AHA 2005 guideline update for the diagnosis and management of chronic heart failure in the adult: a report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines (Writing Committee to Update the 2001 Guidelines for the Evaluation and Management of Heart Failure).

Mariell Jessup, MD, FACC, FAHA, Chair [*][1]

William T. Abraham, MD, FACC, FAHA[†][2]

Donald E. Casey, MD, MPH, MBA[‡][3]

Arthur M. Feldman, MD, PhD, FACC, FAHA[§][4]

Gary S. Francis, MD, FACC, FAHA[§][4]

Theodore G. Ganiats, MD[∥][5]

Marvin A. Konstam, MD, FACC[¶][6]

Donna M.

/pdf/2009-focused-update-incorporated-into-the-acc-aha-2005-3z9lhvyqwq.pdf

2009 Focused Update Incorporated Into the ACC/AHA 2005 Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Management of Heart Failure in Adults A Report of the American College of Cardiology Foundation/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines: Developed in Collaboration With the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation

Some states have recently passed “right-to-try” laws that authorize terminally ill patients to request drugs and devices that are too early in their development to be approved by the U.S. Food and ...

Right-to-Try Laws: Hope, Hype, and Unintended Consequences

\n Caplan disagrees with the conclusions reached by Alfred M. and Blair L. Sadler in a companion article, that the current American system of voluntary organ donation is working. Caplan maintains that the unmet increase in demand for cadaver organs as a result of advances in transplantation technology necessitates a change in public policy. After rejecting the market approach to organ procurement, he relates the experience with \"presumed consent\" in France, where physicians are legally permitted to remove organs without consent but rarely act without the authority of family members. Caplan recommends a policy of \"required request\" for the United States, in which health personnel would be required by law to approach the relatives of potential donors for consent.\n

Organ procurement: it's not in the cards.

For some time the analysis of science by philosophers, sociologists, historians, and others has been dominated by discussions about theory change and development. Metascientific studies have not progressed far beyond bitter wrangles as to the adequacy of such concepts as “paradigms,” “research traditions,” “themata,” and “theories” for adequately describing developments over time in various fields of scientific inquiry. In many respects these disputes have shed a great deal of light on the manner in which scientific ideas change and evolve, but they have also obscured important questions that need to be asked about conceptual development in science in order to understand this process fully and to facilitate the formulation of public policy with respect to science and technology. This volume takes as its focus the notion of controversy. Controversies characterize intellectual change and developments within and about science. Disputes among scientists and between scientists and laymen are easy to locate in the history of science. Moreover, controversies play a central role in the way those who do science and those who depend upon its findings approach the subject. By analyzing controversies in and about science, this volume seeks to advance the analysis of scientific change beyond the sterile and confining boundaries of current disputes concerning the role of internal and external factors in fueling scientific change. Science, ethics, and politics are marked by controversies. As one would expect, the ways in which controversies in each area arise as matters of dispute and approach solution appear to be somewhat divergent. Scientific controversies, for example, are usually seen to be the sorts of disputes that are to be resolved by appeal to facts and to rigorous reasoning concerning facts.

Scientific Controversies: Introduction: Patterns of controversy and closure: the interplay of knowledge, values, and political forces

Fertility preservation is a newly developed branch of reproductive medicine aimed at preserving the potential for genetic parenthood in adults of reproductive age or children, who are at risk of sterility before undergoing anticancer treatments. Except for embryo and semen freezing, all the available options to preserve fertility are considered experimental and thus, they raise ethical issues. In this study, we reviewed the informed consent and the risk-benefit analysis of offering experimental procedures for both adults and children when they are in vulnerable situations. In particular, children represent a special category of patients and their assent to treatment to be sought at anytime should be possible. Overall, there should be no ethical objections to offer these services as they are offered with the scope of preserving future fertility.

Ethical issues surrounding fertility preservation in cancer patients.

Pluripotent human stem cell research may offer new treatments for hundreds of diseases, but opponents of this research argue that such therapy comes attached to a Faustian bargain: cures at the cost of the destruction of many frozen embryos. The National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), government officials, and many scholars of bioethics, including, in these pages, John Robertson, have not offered an adequate response to ethical objections to stem cell research. Instead of examining the ethical issues involved in sacrificing human embryos for the goal of curing fatal and disabling diseases, they seek to either dismiss the moral concerns of those with objections or to find an "accomodation" with those opposed to stem cell research. An ethical argument can be made that it is justifiable to modify or destroy certain human embryos in the pursuit of cures for dread and lethal diseases. Until this argument is made, the case for stem cell research will rest on political foundations rather than on the ethical foundations that the funding of stem cell research requires.

Arthur L. Caplan

Papers

Right-to-Try Laws: Hope, Hype, and Unintended Consequences

Organ procurement: it's not in the cards.

Scientific Controversies: Introduction: Patterns of controversy and closure: the interplay of knowledge, values, and political forces

Ethical issues surrounding fertility preservation in cancer patients.

The ethics and politics of small sacrifices in stem cell research.