One of the most vexing emotional and ethical issues in all of medicine is the decision by family members to “pull the plug,” that is, to take a severely ill, non-communicate relative off of the life-support systems keeping him or her alive.
Archives for November 2012
Insuring Against Cancer Patients’ Infertility
Imagine being a young woman in your 30s. You have just received a diagnosis of breast cancer, as more than 10,000 women your age in the U.S. do every year. Other young women your age may get similarly horrifying news — ovarian cancer, leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Questioning The Ads For Below-The-Waist Surgery
Not surprisingly, the headline about “designer vagina” procedures in a press release this week from BMJ Open, an online publication of the esteemed BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) caught my eye — and stopped my coffee cup in midair.
For Adults In Pain, Just Say Yes To Marijuana
I have just finished writing a book on chronic pain and, although I didn’t initially plan it this way, I ended up devoting an entire chapter to marijuana because, as I did my research, I found considerable evidence that marijuana is both safe and reasonably effective at relieving pain. In fact, if a person taking opioids (narcotics) for pain relief also smokes marijuana, the dose of opioids needed can often be reduced.
Inmate Sex Change: Should We Pay And Does The Surgery Actually Work?
As the controversy continues to swirl over sex change surgery for convicted murderer Michelle Lynn (formerly Robert) Kosilek (there’s a hearing this month on whether taxpayers should pay for her electrolysis), I got to wondering about some of the questions this case raises.