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

Conflicts of interest are known to create problems for the integrity of biomedical research. The editors of the JCI have set out a rigorous policy to help manage conflicts. But they focus only on financially generated conflicts. Here I identify other sources of conflict and offer some suggestions for their management.

/pdf/halfway-there-the-struggle-to-manage-conflicts-of-interest-th0ijtobzn.pdf

Halfway there: the struggle to manage conflicts of interest

Not too long ago I witnessed an incident in a large teaching hospital in which consent to perform an amputation was secured from a patient in a particularly disturbing manner. A senior attending physician had been trying for a few days to persuade an older patient suffering from diabetes to give permission for a below-the-knee amputation of his gangrenous left leg. While taking a group of residents on rounds he mentioned that he had had an especially hard time obtaining permission for an operation that he believed was absolutely essential to save the patient's life. He pointed to one of the residents and said "part of the job of being a physician is to deal with problems like this—get the damn consent." The young resident trotted off to find the reluctant patient. About 20 minutes later he emerged triumphant from the patient's room waving a signed consent form for all

A History and Theory of Informed Consent

Executive summary: It's wrong not to test: The case for universal, frequent rapid COVID-19 testing.

Everywhere one looks in health care, concern is being expressed about the ethical issues raised by efforts to contain costs. Managed care bears much of the brunt of these concerns. Many health policy analysts argue that the central issue raised by the need to contain costs is the need to arrive at a set of rules or principles that will permit the fair and equitable allocation of resources. However, the main moral challenge posed by cost containment is not arriving at agreed-upon principles. Rather, it is the moral dilemma created when health care providers are asked to serve in the roles of both bedside patient advocate and guardian of societal resources. This is especially true in the field of rehabilitation medicine, where patients often cannot protect their own interests due to impairments of competency or loss of freedom as a result of institutionalization, or because they find it hard to deal with the team approach, In which the locus of authority can be difficult to determine.

The Ethics of Gatekeeping in Rehabilitation Medicine

In a recent article, R. H. Peters (1976) has claimed that vast portions of evolutionary and ecological theory are based upon tautologous or circular arguments. Unfortunately, much of Peters's evidence in support of this claim rests upon a number of conceptual confusions regarding such notions as \"tautology,\" \"empirical,\" \"logically necessary,\" and \"circular.\" Once these confusions have been elucidated, much of Peters's attempt to exorcise the demons of tautology and circularity from evolutionary and ecological thinking can be seen to be unnecessary. A tautology, Peters claims, consists of a set of premises or axioms the ramifications of which follow by logical necessity. Tautologies, he maintains, are selfcontained deductive arguments of which the premises need not have empirical correspondences and thus cannot be falsified or used to make empirical predictions. However, this definition of tautology is simply incorrect. When philosophers or logicians refer to tautologies, they are describing propositional statements, not arguments. The propositions referred to by this term have the property of being true regardless of the truth values assigned to the constituent elements of the proposition. Thus a proposition of the form \"A or not A\" is tautologous, since it is true whether A is true or false. Peters confuses the concept of tautology with the notion of logical validity. He complains that evolutionary arguments can frequently be seen as consisting of a set of consequences following logically from a set of premises or axioms. This, however, is true of any valid argument whatsoever and has nothing to do with the concepts of tautology or falsifiability. Consider an argument of the sort frequently found in elementary logic texts:

Arthur L. Caplan

Papers

Halfway there: the struggle to manage conflicts of interest

A History and Theory of Informed Consent

Executive summary: It's wrong not to test: The case for universal, frequent rapid COVID-19 testing.

The Ethics of Gatekeeping in Rehabilitation Medicine

Tautology, Circularity, and Biological Theory