"A Role for Moral Vision in Public Health" recommends that bioethics join forces with public health to develop a moral vision to inform policy and practice. While public health interventions were once accomplished through improvements in infrastructure, such as better sanitation, "today's public health goals often require changing individual behavior, often through state action," writes Daniel B. Rubin, a doctoral student in public health and a law student at the University of Michigan Rubin. "Such interventions raise substantive questions about the extent to which government . . . should intrude on individual bodies to improve the health of the body politic."
"The Art of Dying Well" argues that one of the most pressing bioethical concerns is to create a framework for teaching an aging population to prepare for death and support one another through the dying process. Even though bioethics has always debated end-of-life issues, Lydia Dugdale, MD, an assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine, says, "American society remains ill equipped for the experience of dying." Among the reasons are advances in medical technology that have "obscured the distinction between death and life," physicians' difficulty in discussing end-of-life issues with their patients, and the secularization of Western culture, which has marginalized the role of religion in preparing people for death. Bioethics can help, Dugdale says, by working to create "a modern version of the Ars moriendi, or Art of Dying, which expressed the societal and ecclesiastical response in the Middle Ages to the widespread death caused by the plague."
"The Challenge of Regenerative Medicine" outlines the ethical questions raised by the effort under way in all medical fields to regenerate human tissue as a means of treating degenerative diseases. "In the future, regenerative medicine may therefore touch most of our lives," wri
'/>"/>
| Contact: Michael Turton 845-424-4040 x242 The Hastings Center Source:Eurekalert |