Michael J. O’Brien, MD and William P. Meehan III, MD
It is unclear whether the decreased risk of injury associated with prohibiting a teenage boy from playing football outweighs the benefits to his health and well-being of allowing him to participate.
Distinctions between treatment and enhancement, and between supposedly authentic and inauthentic tools, often inform judgments about what is morally acceptable in sport.
One major difficulty in collecting data on which to base injury prevention strategies is the lack of large epidemiologic studies and comprehensive injury surveillance.
Our ability to infer mental states from fMRI scans is still rudimentary, but the time may be approaching when neuroimaging can be used to indicate witnesses’ reliability in court proceedings.
Physicians have an ethical responsibility to be functionally literate in health statistics and able to explain information such as a test’s positive predictive value to their patients.