Newly released guidelines from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggest illegitimate, unproven stem cell uses might become a thing of the past.
Policy & Ethics
Amidst the noise of the opioid crisis is a pernicious shift in power, from doctors and their patients to the government. In a futile attempt to fight the unwinnable war on drugs, many states are now restricting what doctors can prescribe. Dr. Josh Bloom whose recent Op-Ed appeared in the Las Vegas Tribune-Review, looks at this frightening trend.
Volunteer tourism, or voluntourism, is an emerging trend of travel linked to “doing good”. Yet these efforts to help people and the environment have come under heavy criticism – I believe for good reason.
Voluntourists’ ability to change systems, alleviate poverty or provide support for vulnerable children is limited. They simply don’t have the skills. And they can inadvertently perpetuate patronizing and unhelpful ideas about the places they visit.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer is suffering through a period of critical upheaval, with ethical breaches of one of its environmental activists having been exposed. Meanwhile, IARC's posturing may get its funding pulled.
It is time to call out academia's fascination with Karl Marx for what it really is: a pernicious form of historical revisionism that is nearly identical to Holocaust denial.
We have never seen anything like this. Climate scientist Mark Jacobson has sued the National Academy of Sciences for publishing an article that disagrees with him. For his hurt feelings, he wants $10 million.
In 2015, the American Council on Science and Health joined every reputable science body in being critical of yet another International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) monograph. In recent years they had become prone to selectively choosing studies to include in their analyses, almost as if they predetermined a conclusion and then found studies to match it.
The EPA insists that poor air quality in America is a terrible killer and must be regulated regardless of the economic burden imposed. But with no evidence to justify such a claim, this is nothing more than a Noble Lie.
Steve Milloy, a biostatistician and lawyer, conducted a study to examine if small particulate matter in air pollution was linked to acute deaths. Using publicly available death certificates, he found no such correlation. Furthermore, using hospital discharge data, he found no link between ozone levels and asthma attacks in the Sacramento area.
A short while ago, despite two hurricanes and a shooting in Las Vegas, advocacy journalists in North Carolina were spending time attempting to Gerrymander the word "conservationist" in order to make sure an expert in favor of natural gas could be excluded from a committee. Mostly because he lacked their key criterion, a donation to Sierra Club.
Leverage. Leveraging. While these might seem like terms associated with Hollywood movies like "Wall Street", "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" or "The Wolf of Wall Street", the reality is that leveraging is an integral part of academic science and policy research in the 21st century. With fiscal demands upon governments at the state/provincial and federal levels having increased dramatically over the past 20-30 years, innovative strategies were needed to ensure that the public sector’s high level of research (not to mention quality and importance) were not sacrificed.
A recent report on a pilot program to increase the availability of Advanced Practice Registered Nurses underscores the current anti-doctor climate in healthcare. Under-valuing physicians, and replacing them with substandard care, ultimately places the patient at risk. And that, my friends, is unethical.
Let's discuss the opioid crisis from a physician-prescriber perspective, and what surgeons can do now to help our patients.