Health Care Ethics

By the mid 1980s, AIDS hysteria was so rampant that a fearful and prejudiced public ignored stories of gay men falling ill with lesions and mouth ulcers. President Reagan avoided mentioning the disease entirely. Then, as chronicled in Blood Farm, a new HIV-positive population emerged, one that included kids like Ken Dixon, Brad Cross, and Ryan White who had been infected as young as ten years old. But how?

In these hard times of global financial peril and growing social inequality, injuries to dignity are pervasive. "Indignity has many faces," one man told Nora Jacobson as she conducted interviews for this book. Its expressions range from rudeness, indifference, and condescension to objectification, discrimination, and exploitation. Yet dignity can also be promoted. Another man described it as "common respect," suggesting dignity's ordinariness, and the ways we can create and share it through practices like courtesy, leveling, and contribution.

Biosecurity Dilemmas examines conflicting values and interests in the practice of "biosecurity," the safeguarding of populations against infectious diseases through security policies. Biosecurity encompasses both the natural occurrence of deadly disease outbreaks and the use of biological weapons. Christian Enemark focuses on six dreaded diseases that governments and international organizations give high priority for research, regulation, surveillance, and rapid response: pandemic influenza, drug-resistant tuberculosis, smallpox, Ebola, plague, and anthrax. The book is organized around four ethical dilemmas that arise when fear causes these diseases to be framed in terms of national or international security: protect or proliferate, secure or stifle, remedy or overkill, and attention or neglect.

With Mental Health, Inc., award-winning investigative journalist Art Levine delivers a Shock Doctrine-style exposé of the failures of our out-of-control, profits-driven mental health system, with a special emphasis on the failures of the pharmaceuticals industry, including the treatment of children with antipsychotics and disastrous PTSD protocols for veterans.

This is a historical, nonfiction, true story and addresses necessary changes that must be implemented, maintained, and enforced in worldwide healthcare provider professional training programs and hospitals. The book exposes abuses and enslavement policies and attitudes in health care training programs and hospital administrations worldwide and offers simple and genius remedies to eradicate these deleterious policies and slave owner attitudes of hospital administrators.

Dr. Tom Harbin outlines the many reasons medical professionals should pay more attention to the easily-forgotten principles of ethics. This audiobook discusses ethical issues of day-to-day importance, such as prescribing medications, recommending surgery, adopting new procedures, communicating with patients and colleagues, dealing with personal problems such as substance abuse, disruptive behavior, and boundary issues, and managing personal and institutional obstacles to ethics.

"You're Not a Doctor: Why Physicians Are Needed" is a compelling exploration of the contentious issue of nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) seeking greater autonomy in healthcare. As I near the end of my medical school journey, I share firsthand experiences and insights into the risks and rewards of granting midlevel providers more independence.