Tag: drugs

Bioethics Blogs

“She Can’t Help The Choices She Makes”

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STUDENT VOICES | CHYNN PRIZE FIRST-PLACE WINNER

By Madeleine Cardona

I will never forget the day my mother got diagnosed. I could swear that just yesterday I was thirteen years old waiting anxiously to be called in from the waiting room of some fancy New York State doctor’s office. I was young, but I had some idea of what was going on. I knew my parents and I were there because they were going through a divorce and fighting for custody of me. What I did not know was that we were about to endure a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation and that the results were going to change my life forever.

“Madeleine, your mom is very sick,” the psychiatrist attempted to explain to me. I did not understand. I did not know a sick person could look perfectly healthy. “It’s not a physical sickness, it’s in her head. She has a mental disorder called Paranoid Schizophrenia.” She went on using big words to explain how my mother’s brain “wasn’t like other people’s brains.” I sat there listening closely, hanging on every word the woman was saying to me. “She can’t help the choices that she makes, it’s not her fault that she is the way that she is. She needs help.” Every day since that day in the doctor’s office, that remark replays in my head over and over. “She can’t help the choices she makes.”

That is what gave me the most trouble. I sat around for years and years watching the choices that my mother was making, unable to intervene.

Bioethics Blogs

Web Roundup: Opioids as a National Emergency by Katherine Warren

After several years in the headlines, the U.S. opioid crisis has been in the news this summer as the federal government debates its status as a national emergency. On July 31st, the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, led by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, released its interim report on the state of the U.S. opioid crisis. As their “first and most urgent recommendation” for President Trump, the members of the Commission urged him to “[d]eclare a national emergency under either the Public Health Service Act or the Stafford Act.”

The report emerged just as federal officials published a widely cited study showing that 91.8 million (37.8%) U.S. adults had used prescription opioids in 2015, 11.5 million (4.7%) had misused them, and 1.9 million (0.8%) had an opioid use disorder. Nearly half (40.8%) of the individuals who had misused opioids had obtained them for free from family or friends. News reports on the study also declared that “[o]pioid abuse started as a rural epidemic” of “hillbilly heroin” but has now become a “national one.”

President Trump did not initially declare a national opioid emergency, vowing instead in a briefing on August 8^th to focus on prevention, increased law enforcement and drug-related prosecutions, and more aggressive policing of U.S. borders. By August 10th, after significant criticism, Trump told reporters, “We’re going to draw it up and we’re going to make it a national emergency.” As of September 1st, the Trump administration had yet to take the legal steps to formally declare a national emergency around the opioid crisis.

Bioethics News

Abortion pills at home: the new sinister face of the global abortion business

Dutch website “Women on web” is offering to deliver abortion drugs based on mifepristone (RU-486) and misoprostol for use at home, through a simple request on their website (there are lots of sites like this, after which they ask for “a donation of at least 90, 80 or 70 euro”. The website literally states that “a medical abortion can be done safely at home as long as you have good information and have access to emergency medical care in the rare case that there are complications”. Both drugs legally require a medical prescription, so their sale on the internet is illegal.

Abortion pills at home

A woman who feels tempted to make an “abortion” request on this site should know that the side effects of RU-486 are common and objective (see HERE), particularly vaginal bleeding, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and fatigue [2]. In some cases, the intensity of the vaginal bleeding requires a blood transfusion [3], [4].A total of 607 adverse events were reported between September 2000 and September 2004 : 237 hemorrhages, which included 1 fatal, 42 life-threatening, 168 serious, and 68 requiring blood transfusions; 66 infections, which included 7 cases of septic shock, 3 of which were fatal while 4 were life-threatening; 513 patients required a subsequent secondary surgical intervention, 235 urgent and 278 non-urgent. The need to have a surgical abortion after failure of the chemical abortion can be considered a side effect, and occurs in between 1% and 10% of cases. This second surgical intervention can increase the risk of permanent sterility http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1345/aph.1G481a.

Bioethics Blogs

CAR-T cells: A drive to the future of cancer treatment

Conrad Fernandez describes the ethical challenges related to the use of CAR T-cell therapy for cancer patients.

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I am a pediatric oncologist and over the years have looked after hundreds of children with cancer – ranging in age from newborns into their early 20s. About a third of these children have suffered from leukemia. During my career of more than 25 years, I have seen my share of sadness and joy. Roughly one in five of these children have died – most often because of resistance intrinsic to their cancer but sometimes as a consequence of the toxicity of cancer therapy. These toxicities may occur acutely during the treatment (such as severe infections) or more insidiously appear years or decades later. A novel treatment approach that would overcome this resistance while avoiding chemotherapy toxicity would be most welcome.

A few years ago, I sat in a plenary session of the American Society of Hematology annual meeting (the preeminent hematology meeting in the world) where early phase CAR T-cell therapy was discussed. CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cells are genetically reprogrammed immune cells that normally have the job of fighting infection or other foreign intruders into our bodies. CAR T-cells are manufactured to target a subtype of leukemia that is called B-cell leukemia – a type especially common in childhood. I thought to myself to take special note of what I was hearing, as this marked the potential for a paradigm shift in how we approached treatment of leukemia and perhaps other cancers. It is for these relapsed and refractory B-cell leukemia patients that the FDA’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) has just recommended approval of CAR T-cell therapy – the first recommendation for approval of its kind.

Bioethics Blogs

CAR-T cells: A drive to the future of cancer treatment

Conrad Fernandez describes the ethical challenges related to the use of CAR T-cell therapy for cancer patients.

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Bioethics Blogs

FDA Approves First CAR-T Cell Therapy for Pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Caption: Cancer survivor Emily Whitehead with her dog Lucy.
Credit: Emily Whitehead Foundation

Tremendous progress continues to be made against the Emperor of All Maladies, cancer. One of the most exciting areas of progress involves immunotherapy, a treatment strategy that harnesses the natural ability of the body’s own immune cells to attack and kill tumor cells. A lot of extremely hard work has gone into this research, so I was thrilled to learn that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just announced today its first approval of a promising type of immunotherapy called CAR-T cell therapy for kids and young adults with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)—the most common childhood cancer in the U.S.

ALL is a cancer of white blood cells called lymphocytes. Its treatment with chemotherapy drugs, developed with NIH support, has transformed ALL’s prognosis in kids from often fatal to largely treatable: about 90 percent of young patients now recover. But for those for whom the treatment fails, the prognosis is grim.

In the spring of 2012, Emily Whitehead of Philipsburg, PA was one such patient. The little girl was deathly ill, and her parents were worried they’d run out of options. That’s when doctors at Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, gave Emily and her parents new hope. Carl June and his team had successfully treated three adults with their version of CAR-T cell therapy, which is grounded in initial basic research supported by NIH [1,2]. Moving forward with additional clinical tests, they treated Emily—their first pediatric patient—that April. For a while, it was touch and go, and Emily almost died.

Bioethics News

Book Review: Cells Are The New Cure (BenBella Books, Inc., 2017). ISBN 9781944648800.

$26.95. Reviewed by Michael S. Dauber, MA

Cells Are The New Cure, written by Robin Smith, MD, and Max Gomez, PhD, is a book about the history of medical research on cells, both human and non-human, and recent developments in these techniques that have made cellular medicine one of the most promising fields for therapeutic exploration. While the book’s title suggests an exclusive focus on the healing aspects of genetic modification and human stem cell therapy, the text is much more than that: it is a roadmap for understanding the origins of such techniques, the current state of affairs in cellular and genetic therapies, the administrative landscape investigators must traverse in conducting research, and the areas in which we still need to make progress.

Smith and Gomez make an argument that is structurally simple yet gripping: they suggest that targeted therapies involving stem cells and genetic modifications are the future of medicine by pointing to the immense amount of studies in those fields that have yielded beneficial results. While many readers might acknowledge this fact even before reading the book, many may not be aware of the full extent of the knowledge we have gained from research on cells and genetics, or the myriad ways this knowledge has been applied. Of course, Smith and Gomez cover the big diseases that most people think of when imagining medical research: cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative conditions, etc. However, the book also contains detailed information about how we age, what may cause certain allergies, how the body repairs itself, and the ways stem cell therapies, genetic editing techniques, and other complex medicines that build on these methods can be used to treat these conditions.

Bioethics News

Hunting a Killer: Sex, Drugs and the Return of Syphilis

August 24, 2017

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OKLAHOMA CITY — For months, health officials in this socially conservative state capital have been staggered by a fast-spreading outbreak of a disease that, for nearly two decades, was considered all but extinguished.

Syphilis, the deadly sexually transmitted infection that can lead to blindness, paralysis and dementia, is returning here and around the country, another consequence of the heroin and methamphetamine epidemics, as users trade sex for drugs.

To locate possible patients and draw their blood for testing, Oklahoma’s syphilis detectives have been knocking on doors in dilapidated apartment complexes and dingy motels, driving down lonely rural roads and interviewing prison inmates. Syphilis has led them to members of 17 gangs; to drug dealers; to prostitutes, pimps and johns; and to their spouses and lovers, all caught in the disease’s undertow.

Image: By Nydorf, Seymour, 1914-2001, Artist (NARA record: 8467706) – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17203998

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NYTimes

Tags: bioethics, field test, health policy, intervention, obstacles, public health, research, syphilis

Bioethics Blogs

REGISTER NOW! Behind Bars: Ethics and Human Rights in U.S. Prisons

Behind Bars: Ethics and Human Rights in U.S. Prisons November 30 – December 1, 2017 Harvard Medical School campus Longwood Medical Area, Boston, MA The United States leads the world in incarceration. The “War on Drugs” and prioritizing punishment over … Continue reading →

Bioethics Blogs

Teaching Disability Studies in the Era of Trump by Pamela Block

In spring semester of 2017 we (Pam Block and Michele Friedner) co-taught the graduate course “Conceptual Foundations of Disability Studies.” Though the readings were the same as in previous iterations of the course, the emphasis and tone of the class shifted, not just because of the co-teaching but because we were now teaching in a context in which the rights and lives of disabled people are at increased risk. This essay will focus on one class session devoted to a discussion of how disability studies and eugenics are strikingly intertwined in some ways, and why it is salient and important to think about eugenics in the present moment, especially in relation to the current United States presidency.

Eugenics opens up a way to talk about immigration; traits and qualities of and in people; desirability; deservedness; “good” and “bad” science; and the making of facts. Eugenics comes to mind when we think of silencing and containing nasty women and ejecting bad hombres. While we are not arguing that Trump himself advocates eugenics, we argue that a study of the history of eugenics offers an entry point to considering the emergence of past and present norms and normals, especially in relation to perspectives on bodily variation. We also think that a discussion of eugenics affords different ways of conceptualizing what disability studies scholars Snyder and Mitchell (2010) call “able-nationalism,” (riffing off of Puar’s (2007) work on homonationalism). That is, a discussion of eugenics allows for consideration of how disability—and the values attached to it– is mobilized in different time periods, in the service to the nation.