Philosophy & Ethics

Disease Mongering: "Low T" And Marketing Testosterone For Aging

The marketing, prescribing and selling of testosterone and growth hormone as panaceas for age-related problems is disease mongering, write the authors of a paper in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Disease mongering is inventing new broader defi ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 24 2015 - 7:16pm

Implicit Association Test Says There Is Racism In Clinicians, But Clinical Decisions Don't Show It

There may be unconscious race and social class biases in trauma and acute-care clinicians, according to a survey, but they did not affects clinical decisions finds an analysis in JAMA Surgery. ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 4 2015 - 1:15pm

After Andreas Lubitz, Should Pilots Have Less Medical Privacy?

Since it was revealed that Andreas Lubitz – the co-pilot who purposefully crashed Germanwings Flight 9525, killing 150 people – had been treated for psychiatric illness, a debate has ensued over whether privacy laws regarding medical records should be les ...

Article - The Conversation - Apr 15 2015 - 2:36pm

We've Forgotten The Trial Of Socrates: Excellence And Winning Aren’t The Same Thing

Surveying news headlines in recent years, it seems that cheating is rampant. In the athletic arena, Lance Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for using performance-enhancing drugs. In business, some of the world’s largest banks have ...

Article - The Conversation - Apr 18 2015 - 8:30am

In Holland, Doctors Make The Decision To Withhold Treatment For Elderly

In America, the saying used to be 'my doctor should decide my medical treatment, not an insurance company'.  In Netherlands, Dutch doctors do decide, including whether to withhold or withdraw treatment in a substantial proportion of elderly patie ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 20 2015 - 6:34pm

The Murky Ethical Waters Of Marketing To Cancer Patients

By Lisa Marie Potter, Inside Science — A group of doctors clad in white lab coats smiles beneath the heading: "Standing behind your cancer care with nationally recognized excellence." The advertisement was part of the 2009 Dartmouth-Hitchcock he ...

Article - Lisa Marie Potter - May 25 2015 - 10:51am

But Is It Crazy Enough

Not only that the Theory of Everything cannot be reached by empirical science. Experiment cannot even decide which medium level theory is correct and who was supposedly wrong. ...

Article - Sascha Vongehr - May 17 2015 - 9:43pm

People Who Don't Subscribe To Moral Relativism Support Harsher Criminal Punishments

Our belief in evil influences our feelings about capital punishment, according to Donald Saucier, associate professor of psychology at Kansas State University and Russell Webster at St. Mary's College of Maryland. They drew their conclusion after abo ...

Article - News Staff - May 20 2015 - 10:43am

Blue Buffalo Admits Its Pet Food Contains The Poultry Byproduct It Ridicules In Competitors

If you have been purchasing Blue Buffalo pet food based on its rather suspicious claims about being "byproduct free", well, that is the power of marketing, no different than organic- and gluten-free manufacturers have created a similar health hal ...

Article - News Staff - May 19 2015 - 8:00am

The Real Ghost Of Kubrick's Version Of "The Shining"- Franz Kafka

I have a wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I’m not a Franz Kafka, sitting alone and suffering. So wrote Stanley Kubrick in 1972. And indeed, Kafka and Kubrick may not seem to have a whole lot in common. Kafka is Czech, Kubrick American. ...

Article - The Conversation - May 30 2015 - 10:00am