Bridging Divides: < em > art and religion in the early AIDS pandemic < /em >
This article rediscovers an archive rich in interdisciplinary illness narratives, arguing that the unearthed art pieces articulate four themes that interrogate the relationship between people with AIDS and religious traditions. In addition to furthering our understanding of a forgotten expression of AIDS illness narratives, this analysis provides insight into art's capacity to dialogue between communities in the setting of internal divisions. These lessons may aid us as we endeavor to understand the diversity, function, and applications of illness narratives in the setting of the politicized diseases of the 21st century, i...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Matthew Kelly Source Type: research
Placebos and Metaphors
The objective of this essay is to develop the argument that placebos are a species of metaphor and to demonstrate that an analysis of the figurative trope can help us elucidate the power of the placebo response. The cognitive and embodied responses to both metaphors and placebos stem from the transfer of meaning between two domains, each with rich allusive properties that in turn depend on highly ramified and interconnected neural webs. Metaphors and placebos require an appropriate cultural backdrop for their linguistic and cognitive work and are dependent on shared social forms of life. More specifically, metaphors rely o...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Abraham Fuks Source Type: research
Publishing Biomedical Research: < em > a rapidly evolving ecosystem < /em >
This article takes a broad view of the biomedical research publishing system from its origins in the 17th century to the present day. It begins with a story from the author's lab that illustrates a scientist's complex interactions with the publishing system and then reviews the history, growth, and evolution of scientific publishing, including several recent disruptive developments: the digital transformation, the open access (OA) movement, the creation of "predatory journals," and the emergence of preprint archives. Each has influenced scientific peer review and editorial decision-making, two processes critical to the con...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Jeffrey S Flier Source Type: research
Mycobacterial Death and Resurrection: < em > paradigm shifts in disease understanding < /em >
This article examines two medical journal research articles on tuberculosis, one published in 1938 and the other in 2014. The two articles, which use animal models to understand aspects of tuberculosis mycobacteria survival in the lungs, rely on markedly different research and biotechnological techniques, reach somewhat opposite conclusions, and reflect different paradigms of tuberculosis pathogenesis: the 1938 article (indirectly invoking Koch's postulates) was written before the paradigm of so-called "latent" and "reactivation" tuberculosis became widely adopted, while the 2014 article (indirectly invoking the molecular ...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Chadi Cortas Source Type: research
Futures of Care: Care Technologies and Graphic Medicine
Perspect Biol Med. 2023;66(4):639-650. doi: 10.1353/pbm.2023.a909732.ABSTRACTAssistive care technologies, developed to replace, support, or extend human capabilities and to address the surging demands of care, have been gaining prominence recently. The current trend summons a posthuman approach through decentering the privileged role of humans in several spaces of caregiving, such as hospitals and eldercare homes. The existence of these cutting-edge assistive technologies, exciting as they are, hints at a possible future when the distinction between humans and technology will be blurred, thus transforming care relations. H...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Sathyaraj Venkatesan Livine Ancy A Source Type: research
Futures of Care: Care Technologies and Graphic Medicine
Perspect Biol Med. 2023;66(4):639-650. doi: 10.1353/pbm.2023.a909731.ABSTRACTAssistive care technologies, developed to replace, support, or extend human capabilities and to address the surging demands of care, have been gaining prominence recently. The current trend summons a posthuman approach through decentering the privileged role of humans in several spaces of caregiving, such as hospitals and eldercare homes. The existence of these cutting-edge assistive technologies, exciting as they are, hints at a possible future when the distinction between humans and technology will be blurred, thus transforming care relations. H...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Sathyaraj Venkatesan Livine Ancy A Source Type: research
Imagine This: Happy Aging in America
Perspect Biol Med. 2023;66(4):610-619. doi: 10.1353/pbm.2023.a909730.ABSTRACTThis essay explores what it means to age happily, beginning with concepts of aging and happiness and proceeding to factors that promote or undermine happy aging. Relationships, contribution, and personal growth all add value to an aging life. Community also matters, as does the acceptance that a happy older age requires neither perfect health nor immense wealth.PMID:38661848 | DOI:10.1353/pbm.2023.a909730 (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Tia Powell Source Type: research
Negative Impacts of < em > Taegyo < /em > : Feminist and Disability Perspectives
This study examines the origin and religious roots of taegyo, Korean traditional prenatal education, and raises concerns about potential negative impacts of contemporary taegyo practice from feminist and disability perspectives. Taegyo has been accepted without much criticism due to its deep integration into prenatal care culture, and most existing literature focuses on taegyo's positive impacts on fetal health and development from scientific or nursing perspectives. This article analyzes a 19th-century taegyo manual, Taegyo Singi, and Seon and Won Buddhist literatures on taegyo in order to understand the religio-cultural ...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Hajung Lee Source Type: research
Bios-Ethics and the Bios Emergency: Finding the Real Work
This article presents a case for transforming traditional bioethics into "Bios-ethics." This exposition relies on three propositions: (1) the climate emergency is the "Bios emergency"; (2) in the Bios emergency, bioethics must be replaced by Bios-ethics; and (3) the top and overwhelming priority of Bios-ethics is to address the Bios emergency. Biocentrism, habitat, and environmental ethics are discussed in light of their contribution to the development of Bios-ethics, and potential lines of research in Bios-ethics are outlined. The urgency of undertaking substantive conceptual and practical innovations in response to our c...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: David Schenck Source Type: research
Euthanasia and End-of-Life Decisions: From the Empirical Turn to Moral Intuitionism
This article employs a "revisionary" intuititionist perspective to discuss the results of a clinical ethics study about intensivists' perceptions of withhold or withdraw decisions. The results show that practitioners' moral experience is at odds with both the discontinuity and equivalence theses. This outcome allows us to revisit certain concepts, such as intention and causal relationship, that are prominent in the conceptual debate. Intensivists also regard end-of-life decisions as being on a scale from least to most active, and whether they regard active forms of end-of-life decisions as ethically acceptable depends on t...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Marta Spranzi Source Type: research
Organismal Superposition Problem and Nihilist Challenge in the Definition of Death
Perspect Biol Med. 2024;67(1):1-21. doi: 10.1353/pbm.2024.a919707.ABSTRACTAccording to the mainstream bioethical stance, death constitutes the termination of an organism. This essay argues that such an understanding of death is inappropriate in the usual context of determining death, since it also has a social bearing. There are two reasons to justify this argument. First, the mainstream bioethical definition generates an organismal superposition challenge, according to which a given patient in a single physiological state might be both alive and dead, like Schrödinger's cat. Therefore, there is no clear answer as to whet...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Piotr Grzegorz Nowak Source Type: research
Should the Use of Adaptive Machine Learning Systems in Medicine be Classified as Research?
Am J Bioeth. 2024 Apr 25:1-12. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2024.2337429. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTA novel advantage of the use of machine learning (ML) systems in medicine is their potential to continue learning from new data after implementation in clinical practice. To date, considerations of the ethical questions raised by the design and use of adaptive machine learning systems in medicine have, for the most part, been confined to discussion of the so-called "update problem," which concerns how regulators should approach systems whose performance and parameters continue to change even after they have received regulatory ...
Source: The American Journal of Bioethics : AJOB - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Robert Sparrow Joshua Hatherley Justin Oakley Chris Bain Source Type: research
Does Bioethics Need Ethical Theories?
Perspect Biol Med. 2024;67(1):166-179. doi: 10.1353/pbm.2024.a919718.ABSTRACTThe relationship between philosophy and bioethics remains a matter of perennial debate, but there does appear to be a consensus on one issue: whatever bioethics might want to borrow from philosophical ethics, it won't be normative theories. This essay argues that theories can have an important role to play in bioethics, though it might not be the one traditionally assumed by philosophers.PMID:38662071 | DOI:10.1353/pbm.2024.a919718 (Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine)
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Wayne Sumner Source Type: research
Bio-Psycho-Spiritual Perspectives on Psychedelics: Clinical and Ethical Implications
Perspect Biol Med. 2024;67(1):117-142. doi: 10.1353/pbm.2024.a919715.ABSTRACTPsychedelics have again become a subject of widespread interest, owing to the reinvigoration of research into their traditional uses, possible medical applications, and social implications. As evidence for psychedelics' clinical potential mounts, the field has increasingly focused on searching for mechanisms to explain the effects of psychedelics and therapeutic efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT). This paper reviews three general frameworks that encompass several prominent models for understanding psychedelics' effects-specifically, ne...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Logan Neitzke-Spruill Nese Devenot Dominic Sisti Lynnette A Averill Amy L McGuire Source Type: research
Living Donor Ethics and Uterus Transplantation
This article provides an in-depth ethical analysis of living donor uterus transplantation, incorporating clinical, psychological, and qualitative study data into the discussion. Although the concept of living organ donors as patients in their own right has not always been present in the field of transplantation, this conceptualization informs the framework for living donor ethics that we apply to living uterus donation. This framework takes root in the principles of research ethics, which include respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. It incorporates an analysis based on eight potential vulnerabilities of living do...
Source: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - April 25, 2024 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Anji E Wall Giuliano Testa Source Type: research
