After years of funding disease-specific treatment, donation trends have shifted to support broader health systems infrastructure development. A remaining challenge is how to sustain antiretroviral therapy (ART) for patients in resource-poor regions.
AMA J Ethics. 2016;18(7):681-690. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.7.ecas3-1607.
The pace at which neurotechnological developments are being translated into clinical applications calls for a preparatory neuroethical model that can plot the benefits, burdens, and risks of neurosurgery as a step toward minimizing risks and maximizing benefits.
Introduction of an intervention that reduces the perceived risk of a given behavior may cause a person to increase risky behavior—this is called “risk compensation.”
Research in the PED and PICU is essential to medical understanding of the efficacy of emergency interventions. Researchers must minimize the additional stress that consent and participation in research entail for pediatric patients and their families.
Research is often conducted without the knowledge or consent of those whose tissues are banked and poses possible harms to social groups if information about a few members is unscientifically applied to all.
Aside from its use to rule out potential physical causes of a patient’s condition, for example a brain tumor, neuroimaging is not used in the process of psychiatric diagnosis.
Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.
Some commentators say comparative trials of FDA-approved drugs are overburdened by current Common Rule regulations and that researchers should not be required to obtain explicit consent for participation in the most innocuous of these trials.
Laurel J. Lyckholm, MD and Arwa K. Aburizik, MD, MS
Decision-making capacity can be preserved in patients with mental illness and should be formally assessed in the context of their values and past decisions.
AMA J Ethics. 2017;19(5):444-453. doi:
10.1001/journalofethics.2017.19.5.ecas4-1705.