October 18, 2024
(MedPage Today) – Last month, California passed a bill ensuring that doctors, not artificial intelligence (AI), have the final say on patients’ treatments and services. The bill, SB1120, allows insurance companies to use AI to review doctors’ recommendations for medical … Read More
October 17, 2024
(Fast Company) – During Helene and Milton, the AI tool I used most—AI RI—was developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. It gives updated hourly odds on the chances of a nascent hurricane going through a bout of rapid … Read More
October 16, 2024
(The Conversation) – In 2014, the World Health Organisation highlighted the need to include palliative care in health policies and to improve access to essential medicines such as morphine. It also stressed the importance of training health professionals in palliative … Read More
October 9, 2024
(New York Times) – I’m in the writers’ room helping to draft the script for a new television medical drama, and we’ve hit a roadblock in the fourth act. We’ve successfully set up the mystery and designed a clever way … Read More
October 7, 2024
(The Atlantic) – As a palliative-care physician, I have encountered the phenomenon of people dying only after specific circumstances materialize. There was the gentleman whose family held vigil in the intensive-care unit while he continued on, improbably, even without the … Read More
October 7, 2024
(New York Times) – These new tools excel at medicine’s technical side — I’ve seen them diagnose complex diseases and offer elegant, evidence-based treatment plans. But they’re also great at bedside communication, crafting language that convinces listeners that a real, … Read More
October 7, 2024
(New York Times) – After I spent more than 50 years chasing and fighting viruses, one fought back and nearly took me down. I speak of the West Nile virus, delivered by the deadliest animal on the planet: the mosquito. … Read More
October 3, 2024
(The Times Weekly) – Since our health care system does not treat everyone equally, the practice of physician – assisted suicide raises the risk for those who often do not get the same access and treatment as others. This includes … Read More
September 26, 2024
(Undark) – If artificial intelligence-created content floods the internet, who decides what online information is worth archiving? The internet is about to become deluged with a mass of low-effort, AI-generated content, potentially drowning out human work. This oncoming wave poses … Read More
September 25, 2024
(The Conversation) – In a 2023 survey of more than 1,000 U.S. medical students, about 58% of respondents said they received no formal nutrition education while in medical school for four years. Those who did averaged about three hours of … Read More
September 18, 2024
(Plough) – If only her parents had been spared the terrible freedom of having to choose whether to have a child with a disability. “My husband and I decided that it was a loving decision not to bring her into … Read More
September 18, 2024
(New York Times) – So what does Gen Z really think about social media? Is it more like walkie-talkies, where hardly anyone wished they had never been invented? Or is it more like cigarettes, where smokers often say they enjoy … Read More
September 16, 2024
(Wired) – I’m a gun-owning emergency physician, a father, and the cousin of a man who was shot to death. If it wasn’t for the National Rifle Association declaring in 2018 that physicians, like me, should “stay in their lane” … Read More
September 13, 2024
(Romper) – Fertility, pregnancy, birth — they’re medical, yes, but they’re also something more. I realized that I had miscategorized this adventure in my head. I had not thought of egg freezing as a fertility treatment. In fact, I had … Read More
September 11, 2024
(STAT News) – A single question doesn’t give context, ask what’s most important to you to guide this decision, or share why we may recommend do-not-resuscitate (DNR) when CPR likely won’t work and cause further suffering. Popular shows like “Grey’s … Read More
September 10, 2024
(Nature) – Questions surrounding an often-repeated statistic about Indigenous Peoples and biodiversity show that researchers should take more care when sourcing facts. For at least two decades, scientists, policymakers and journals, including Nature, have cited a statistic without determining its … Read More
September 9, 2024
(New York Times) – A generation ago, bioethicists fought over whether assisted reproductive technology would be normalized or made taboo. Now there’s strong public consensus that it should be not only tolerated but also celebrated. But this may be a … Read More
September 3, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Assisted suicide was sold as compassionate. In practice it has turned out to be monstrous. The new law dropped safeguards, such as the minimum 10-day assessment period between request and provision. It also proposed mental illness … Read More
August 23, 2024
(Undark) – Debate over Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying law shows the need to rethink the biological model of mental illness. I was horrified by the news of the law’s latest expansion — a reaction that surprised me. Having grown … Read More
August 23, 2024
(The Conversation) – Australia currently finds itself in the unusual position of being both in an opioid epidemic and experiencing a shortage of these critical medicines. The Therapeutic Goods Administration has placed eight oral morphine products on its shortage list. … Read More
August 23, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – There are plenty of reasons to be wary of AI, but let’s not dismiss the possibilities it offers for improving accessibility. While the New York Times sues OpenAI over ChatGPT’s scraping of its content and everyone … Read More
August 21, 2024
(Rolling Stone) – The tech in Elon Musk’s electric vehicles is supposed to prevent accidents, but in several cases, it nearly caused one When the “Full Self-Driving” setting is enabled in a Tesla, according to the automaker’s own description, the … Read More
August 19, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – One day in the maybe-not-so-distant future, YouTube won’t exist and its videos may be lost forever. Facebook—and your uncle’s holiday posts—will vanish. There is precedent for this. MySpace, the first largish-scale social network, deleted every photo, … Read More
August 16, 2024
(The Conversation) – I’m a medical anthropologist and bioethicist who studies the values and experiences driving prenatal gene therapy developments, including genome editing. Human prenatal genome editing has not happened yet – as far as we know. Prenatal genome editing … Read More
August 13, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Google’s Android chief told our columnist the voice assistant was designed to impersonate humans, but he doesn’t want anyone getting romantic with it I’m not saying I prefer talking to Google’s Gemini Live over a real … Read More
