This month theme issue editor, Trahern Jones, a fourth-year student at Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota, spoke with Dr. Edward Laskowski about the use of performance-enhancing drugs and substances among athletes today.
Concerns about the deleterious effects of stress on the mind and body have led to the beginnings of a stress vaccine, an injection that will reduce these effects.
The social-justice question we must pose to physicians is: Are you willing to advocate for changes to the medical system that creates the need for you to take on charity care in the first place?
Is it ethical to create and advertise, either publicly or during office visits, package deals that offer patients an incentive to have procedures they are not already seeking and might not have considered?
Within the patient-physician relationship, the request for neuroenhancement becomes a chief concern, and the physician has a duty to take a history and perform a physical exam to determine whether the patient’s current level of function represents significant change.
The importance of the Oregon experiment is that the state developed a public process for prioritizing medical services rather than relying on undisclosed private decisions by individuals or insurers.
If I am unwilling to pay more taxes so an 85-year-old stranger can have a left-ventricular assist device, then I am morally obligated to say the same holds true for a future version of me in those same circumstances.
Some question whether plastic surgeons bear responsibility for promoting suspect norms of beauty, given that certain types of cosmetic enhancements reinforce common conceptions of normality that are harmful to society.