Despite drawbacks of immunosuppression and surgery, vascularized composite allotransplants can enhance lives of patients who meet candidacy criteria and are well supported.
AMA J Ethics. 2019;21(11):E968-973. doi:
10.1001/amajethics.2019.968.
Diagnosing a child with borderline signs of Asperger disorder can be a gateway to needed interventions and services and also a label that stigmatizes or influences the child’s development.
Fabian von Knoch, MD, Anthony Marchie, MD, MPhil, and Henrik Malchau, MD, PhD
An argument that national joint registries have improved outcomes for arthroplasty patients because they track device performance, reduce revision surgeries, and promote evidence-based surgery.
A bioethicist argues that two journal articles about quality of life-adjusted years research oversimplifies the issue and do not take into consideration people's abilities to adapt to disability and disease.
A health economics professor believes more research is needed on quality of life-adjusted years to explore the way we describe health states, the elicitation of patient values, and how to develop methods for obtaining informed general population preferences.
Elly A. Stolk, MSc and Floortje E. van Nooten, MSc
Two medical technology researchers argue that patients' own valuations of their health states may result in devaluation of interventions that can help them.