Health Care Ethics

As much of the world's population grows older, the quest for a "good death" has become a significant issue. For many, the right to die often means the right to die with dignity. The Inevitable moves beyond margins of the law to the people who are meticulously planning their final hours - far from medical offices, legislative chambers, hospital ethics committees, and polite conversation - and the people who help them, loved ones or clandestine groups on the Internet known as the "euthanasia underground".

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.

In The Rights of Mice, Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear, takes listeners inside the war between science and anti-vivisection raging across the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its great educational institutions, Harvard and MIT. As animal rights activists attempt to push through city council an ordinance restricting the use of animals in laboratory testing, leaders in the science and medical communities brace for a fight.

What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? The Way of Medicine articulates and defends an account of medicine and medical ethics meant to challenge the reigning provider of services model, in which clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of “health care services” for the sake of the patient’s subjective well-being.

The problem with pandemics is that people want to forget them. One year, a million Americans are killed by a deadly new virus. The next, everyone is back rooting for the Georgia Bulldogs. The impulse to move on from this particular kind of tragedy is more than a little odd.

Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature - to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why.

For women, the possibility of experiencing medical gaslighting—having a health-care provider dismiss or ignore their concerns without considering appropriate testing or creating a treatment plan—has always been a very real and present danger. And being a woman of color, transgender, or disabled only compounds the risk. Today, more women are aware of medical gaslighting than ever—but awareness isn’t enough. In Medical Gaslighting, you’ll equip yourself with the tools you need to be fully heard at every step of the process.

Asylums are supposed to be in the past. However, though the buildings were closed, many of the practices lived on. In fact, more law-abiding Americans today are being involuntarily committed and forcibly treated "for their own good" than at any time in history.

John Montgomery examines legal and ethical issues surrounding the questions of suicide and assisted suicide, the issues in health care: rights of the unborn, ethics in a changing health care system, and human dignity in birth and death: a question of values.

American taxpayers spend $30 billion annually funding biomedical research, but over half of these studies can't be replicated due to poor experimental design, improper methods, and sloppy statistics. Bad science doesn't just hold back medical progress, it can sign the equivalent of a death sentence for terminal patients. In Rigor Mortis, Richard Harris explores these urgent issues with vivid anecdotes, personal stories, and interviews with the top biomedical researchers. We need to fix our dysfunctional biomedical system - before it's too late.

In this fascinating book, Dr. Dominic M. Etli takes readers on an illuminating journey through the ethical labyrinths of modern medicine, drawing unexpected connections to the ancient wisdom of the samurai. Blending vivid storytelling with philosophical insights, Dr. Etli reveals how timeless concepts like mindfulness, compassion, honor and justice from Zen, Bushido and the Hagakure provide invaluable guidance for today's ethical challenges in healthcare.

Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In The People’s Hospital, physician Ricardo Nuila’s stunning debut, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care.

The timeless human desire to be more beautiful, intelligent, healthy, athletic, or young has given rise in our time to technologies of human enhancement. Some condemn these developments as a new kind of cheating - not just in sports but in life itself - promising rewards without effort and depriving us most of all of what it means to be authentic human beings. "Transhumanists", on the other hand, reject what they see as a rationalizing of human limits, as if being human means being content forever with underachieving bodies and brains.

"AI and Healthcare: A Comprehensive Guide" is a groundbreaking exploration of the revolutionary intersection between artificial intelligence and modern medicine. This authoritative volume offers a balanced, thorough, and accessible overview of how AI is transforming every aspect of healthcare, from diagnosis and treatment to drug discovery and patient care.

David M. Craig traveled across the US to assess its health care access, delivery, and finance. He interviewed religious hospital administrators and interfaith activists, learning how they balance the values of economic efficiency and community accountability. He discovered that health care in the US is not a private good or a public good, but a shared social good. This book argues that as escalating health costs absorb more and more of family income and government budgets, we need to take stock of the full range of health care values.

Modern medicine is a world that glimmers with new technology and cutting-edge research. To the public eye, medical stories often begin with sirens and flashing lights and culminate in survival or death. But these are only the most visible narratives. As a critical care doctor treating people at their sickest, Daniela Lamas is fascinated by a different story: what comes after for those whose lives are extended by days, months, or years as a result of our treatments and technologies?

Doctors and patients have lost control of American medicine. Generative AI can put the power back in their hands, save millions of lives, and restore the doctor-patient relationship. Welcome to ChatGPT, MD. In this unique collaboration, renowned healthcare leader Dr. Robert Pearl teams up with the artificial intelligence system ChatGPT to examine the transformational power of generative AI in medicine.

In The Science of Good and Evil, psychologist and science historian Michael Shermer explores how humans evolved from social primates into moral primates, how and why morality motivates the human animal, and how the foundation of moral principles can be built upon empirical evidence. Along the way he explains the implications of scientific findings for fate and free will, the existence of pure good and pure evil, and the development of early moral sentiments among the first humans.

In the quarter century that Victoria Sweet has been a doctor, "health care" has replaced medicine, "providers" (vastly outnumbered by administrators) look at their laptops more than at their patients, and the ruthless pursuit of efficiency has vanquished not only trust and intimacy but also, often, the effectiveness of treatment. Victoria Sweet knows that there is an alternative way, because she has lived and practiced it. In her new book, she reflects with compassion, wit, and profound insight.

An estimated 10 percent of Americans are implanted with medical devices - like pacemakers, artificial hips, cardiac stents, etc. The overwhelming majority of high-risk implanted devices have never undergone a single clinical trial. The FDA lets device manufacturers decide whether to report serious complications or deaths that may have been caused by their products. Here, award-winning journalist Jeanne Lenzer brings these horrifying statistics to life through the story of one working-class man who, after his "cure" nearly kills him, ends up in a battle for justice.