Dr. Andrew Wakefield's Fraudulent Claims about Autism

This month the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a three part series by Brian Deer, detailing the fraud by which Dr. Andrew Wakefield ...

How Much is Life Worth? - An Oncologist's Call to Arms.

Between 1997 and 2004, Medicare spending on cancer drugs rose by 267% compared to an overall rise in Medicare spending of 47%. With an aging...

ALS, the Rule of Rescue, and the FDA

The opening paragraph in " Fighting for a Last Chance at Life " in today's New York Times led me to expect what the Brits call...

Creating a Culture of Research

I recently came upon a terrific article - "Creating a Culture of Research" - that lays out a strategy aimed at making it easier t...

Research Ethics - Informed Consent for Cluster Randomized Trials

When we make choices in life we compare alternatives with regard to their quality and cost in virtually every area - except for health care!...

Should the NIH Alternative Medicine Center be Defunded?

I only became aware of the controversy about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) from an article in this...

Comparative Effectiveness Research

"Health Care and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," an article today's New England Journal of Medicine, should be r...

Ethics in Time of Financial Crisis

Nancy Walton, lead author for the Research Ethics Blog had an excellent post yesterday about "Ethics on the chopping block." She ...

Health Care Rights in India and the U.S.

In yesterday's post on "Drug Marketing in Mumbai" I mentioned that I'm reading ethics literature from India in preparation...

Senator Grassley, Psychiatric Ethics, and Conflict of Interest

Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is on the warpath about conflict of interest in psychiatry. Mo...

Genomics, Google, and Medical Ethics

The topic for the next meeting of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (a not for profit health insurer in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine...

Access to Experimental Drugs - the Supreme Court Gets it Right

Today’s Los Angeles Times reports that the Supreme Court has turned down an appeal that claimed a right for dying patients to have access t...

Guinea-Pig Ethics

Carl Elliott’s excellent article on “Guinea-Pigging” in the forthcoming January 7 New Yorker (only the abstract is available on-line) educa...

Research Ethics and Quality Improvement

By chance, as I was writing about Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article about checklists for yesterday’s posting, the Sunday New York Times arri...

A Tipping Point for Pharma Ethics?

Pharma is the Jekyll and Hyde of health care. At their best, drug companies develop research-based treatment breakthroughs and do well by do...

Spurious Reasoning about Pharmaceutical Ethics

A recent New York Times Op Ed by Peter Pitts, President of the controversial Center for Medicine in the Public Interest , attacks the idea ...