Expert medical evidence is often essential and pivotal in support or defence of medical negligence. Such cases invariably involve questions of technical and factual complexity requiring the evaluation of conflicting expert medical testimony. In this book, the first standalone textbook on expert evidence in South Africa, the authors expound and extrapolate the whole process from the initial obtaining of the relevant health records to the eventual testimony of the medical expert witness in court. The authors offer an instructive guide to busy practitioners to assist them with - Identifying the correct expert speciality or sub-speciality, The construction of a medico-legal opinion, The status of joint minutes of such experts, The preparation of an expert's examination-in-chief, Cross- and re-examination of an expert. Expert evidence in clinical negligence also discusses the invaluable role of experts in the resolution of medical malpractice disputes by way of mediation. Relevant case law and the applicable uniform rules of court are comprehensively discussed and set out in the footnotes for ease of reference.

From preeminent LGBTQ scholar, social critic, and journalist Steven W. Thrasher comes a powerful and crucial exploration of one of the most pressing issues of our times: how viruses expose the fault lines of society.

Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone.

Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.

Humans encounter and use animals in a stunning number of ways. The nature of these animals and the justifiability or unjustifiabilitly of human uses of them are the subject matter of this volume.
Philosophers have long been intrigued by animal minds and vegetarianism, but only around the last quarter of the twentieth century did a significant philosophical literature begin to be developed on both the scientific study of animals and the ethics of human uses of animals. This literature had a primary focus on discussion of animal psychology, the moral status of animals, the nature and significance of species, and a number of practical problems. This Oxford Handbook is designed to capture the nature of the questions as they stand today and to propose solutions to many of the major problems. Several chapters in this volume explore matters that have never previously been examined by philosophers.
The authors of the thirty-five chapters come from a diverse set of philosophical interests in the History of Philosophy, the Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Biology, the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, the Philosophy of Language, Ethical Theory, and Practical Ethics. They explore many theoretical issues about animal minds and an array of practical concerns about animal products, farm animals, hunting, circuses, zoos, the entertainment industry, safety-testing on animals, the status and moral significance of species, environmental ethics, the nature and significance of the minds of animals, and so on. They also investigate what the future may be expected to bring in the way of new scientific developments and new moral problems.
This book of original essays is the most comprehensive single volume ever published on animal minds and the ethics of our use of animals.

The effective delivery of healthcare services is vital to the general welfare and well-being of a country's citizens. Financial infrastructure and policy reform can play a significant role in optimizing existing healthcare programs. Health Economics and Healthcare Reform: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice is a comprehensive source of academic material on the importance of economic structures and policy reform initiatives in modern healthcare systems. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics such as clinical costing, patient engagement, and e-health, this book is ideally designed for medical practitioners, researchers, professionals, and students interested in the optimization of healthcare delivery.

This fascinating book gives readers an appreciation of how biomedical research should work and how the reality is all too often seriously flawed. Explaining the logical basis of the different research approaches used by biomedical research scientists and their relative merits, it will help readers to make more realistic appraisal of media reports linking aspects of lifestyle, environment or diet to health outcomes and thus judge whether such claims are a real effect worthy of consideration for behavior change or deserving of further research resources. Key features: increases awareness of research fraud and some of the characteristics of fraudulent science and scientific fraudsters shows that whilst outright fraud may be uncommon, fudging of results to help achieve statistical significance may be more prevalent incorporates real-life case studies highlighting some of the infamous cases of research fraud and major scientific mistakes and the impact that they have had provides a convenient overview of the research process in the biomedical sciences, with a focus on research strategy rather than individual methods find supplemental detail on the author's blog https://drgeoffnutrition.wordpress.com/about/ By raising awareness of the possibility that research data may have been dishonestly generated and outlining some of the signs and symptoms that might suggest data fabrication, Error and Fraud: The Dark Side of Biomedical Research will help students and researchers to identify the strengths and limitations of different research approaches and allow them to make a realistic evaluations of their own and others' research findings.

To what extent should parents be allowed to use reproductive technologies to determine the characteristics of their future children? And is there something morally wrong with parents who wish to do this? Choosing Tomorrow's Children provides answers to these (and related) questions. In particular, the book looks at issues raised by selective reproduction, the practice of choosing between different possible future persons by selecting or deselecting (for example) embryos, eggs, and sperm.
Wilkinson offers answers to questions including the following. Do children have a 'right to an open future' and, if they do, what moral constraints does this place upon selective reproduction? Should parents be allowed to choose their future children's sex? Should we 'screen out' as much disease and disability as possible before birth, or would that be an objectionable form of eugenics? Is it acceptable to create or select a future person in order to provide lifesaving tissue for an existing relative? Is there a moral difference between selecting to avoid disease and selecting to produce an 'enhanced' child? Should we allow deaf parents to use reproductive technologies to ensure that they have a deaf child?

When bioethicists debate the use of technologies like surgery and pharmacology to shape our selves, they are, ultimately, debating what it means for human beings to flourish. They are debating what makes animals like us truly happy, and whether the technologies at issue will bring us closer to or farther from such happiness. The positions that participants adopt in debates regarding such ancient and fundamental questions are often polarized, and cannot help but be deeply personal. It is no wonder that the debates are sometimes acrimonious. How, then, should critics of and enthusiasts about technological self-transformation move forward? Based on his experience at the oldest free-standing bioethics research institute in the world, Erik Parens proposes a habit of thinking, which he calls "binocular." As our brains integrate slightly different information from our two eyes to achieve depth of visual perception, we need to try to integrate greatly different insights on the two sides of the debates about technologically shaping our selves-if depth of intellectual understanding is what we are after. Binocular thinking lets us benefit from the insights that are visible from the stance of the enthusiast, who emphasizes that using technology to creatively transform our selves will make us happier, and to benefit from the insights that are visible from the stance of the critic, who emphasizes that learning to let our selves be will make us happier. Parens observes that in debates as personal as these, we all-critics and enthusiasts alike-give reasons that we are partial to. In the throes of our passion to make our case, we exaggerate our insights and all-too-often fall into the conceptual traps that language sets for us. Foolishly, we make conceptual choices that no one who truly wanted understanding would accept: Are technologies value-free or value-laden? Are human beings by nature creators or creatures? Is disability a medical or a social phenomenon? Indeed, are we free or determined? Parens explains how participating in these debates for two decades helped him articulate the binocular habit of thinking that is better at benefiting from the insights in both poles of those binaries than was the habit of thinking he originally brought to the debates. Finally, Parens celebrates that bioethics doesn't aspire only to deeper thinking, but also to better acting. He embraces not only the intellectual aspiration to think deeply about meaning questions that don't admit of final answers, but also the ethical demand to give clear answers to practical questions. To show how to respect both that aspiration and that demand, the book culminates in the description of a process of truly informed consent, in the context of one specific form of using technology to shape our selves: families making decisions about appearance normalizing surgeries for children with atypical bodies.

Death comes for us all, and the desire to ease into that death is as ancient as humankind. The idea that sometimes it is better to die quickly and in control of that death--rather than linger in pain and misery once impending death is certain--has troubled yet comforted humankind. In Doctor, Please Help Me Die, author Tom Preston, MD, presents a thorough overview and discussion of end-of-life issues and physician-assisted death in America.

Doctor, Please Help Me Die traces the history of patients seeking relief from suffering at the end of life and discusses how cultural and professional customs have inhibited many doctors from helping their patients at the end. Preston shows how most doctors fail their patients by not discussing dying with them and by refusing to consider legal physician aid in dying--ultimately deceiving the public in their refusal to help patients die. He discusses the religious, political, and legal battles in this part of the culture war and gives advice to patients on how to gain peaceful dying.

Preston presents a strong argument for why every citizen who is dying ought to be extended an inalienable right to die peacefully, and why every physician has an ethical obligation to assist patients who want to exercise this right safely, securely, and painlessly.

Neuroethics is concerned with the wide array of ethical, legal and social issues that are raised in research and practice. The field has grown rapidly over the last five years, becoming an active interdisciplinary research area involving a much larger set of academic fields and professions, including law, developmental psychology, neuropsychiatry, and the military.
Neuroethics and Practice helps to define and foster this emerging area at the intersection of neuroethics and clinical neuroscience, which includes neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry and their pediatric subspecialties, as well as neurorehabiliation, clinical neuropsychology, clinical bioethics, and the myriad other clinical specialties (including nursing and geriatrics) in which practitioners grapple with issues of mind and brain. Chatterjee and Farah have brought together leading neuroethicists working in clinically relevant areas to contribute chapters on an intellectually fascinating and clinically important set of neuroethical topics, involving brain enhancements, brain imaging, competence and responsibility, severe brain damage, and consequences of new neurotechnologies. Although this book will be of direct interest to clinicians, as the first edited volume to provide an overall comprehensive perspective on neurethics across disciplines, it is also a unique and useful resource for a wide range of other scholars and students interested in ethics and neuroscience.

Genetic Transparency? tackles the question of who has, or should have access to personal genomic information. Genomic science is revolutionary in how it changes the way we live, individually and together, and how it changes the shape of society. If this is so, then - the authors of this volume claim - the rules that regulate genetic transparency should be debated carefully, openly and critically. It is important to see that the social and cultural meanings of DNA and genetic sequences are much richer than can be accounted for by purely biomedical knowledge. In this book, an international group of leading genomics experts and scholars from the humanities and social sciences discuss how the new accessibility of genomic information affects interpersonal relationships, our self-understandings, ethics, law, and healthcare systems. Contributors are: Kirsten Brukamp, Gabrielle Christenhusz, Lorraine Cowley, Malte Dreyer, Jeanette Erdmann, Andrei Famenka, Teresa Finlay, Caroline Fundling, Shannon Gibson, Cathy Herbrand, Angeliki Kerasidou, Lene Koch, Fruzsina Molnar-Gabor, Tim Ohnhauser, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, Benedikt Reiz, Vasilja Rolfes, Sara Tocchetti

Millions of people each year decide to participate in clinical trials--medical research studies involving an innovative treatment for a medical problem. For the patient, such participation can sometimes be a life-saving choice. But it can also be just the opposite. Our country years ago adopted rules designed to assure that people are making informed choices about participation. This book explains the reality behind those rules: that our current system of clinical trials hides much of the information patients need to make the right choices.
Witness the following scenarios:
-Hundreds of patients with colon cancer undergo a new form of keyhole surgery at leading cancer centers--never being told that 85% of colorectal surgeons, worried that it increases the risk of the cancer returning, would not themselves undergo that procedure.
-Tens of thousands of women at high risk of developing breast cancer are asked to participate in a major research study. They are told about the option of having both breasts surgically removed--but not told about the option of taking a standard osteoporosis pill that might cut the risk of getting breast cancer by one-half or more.
What The Doctor Didn't Say, principally written by a nationally prominent expert, is the first book to reveal many heretofore hidden aspects about the true nature of participation in clinical trials. It shows why options not commonly known--including getting a new treatment outside of a research study--can often be the best choice. It explains how patients can make good decisions even if there is only limited information about a treatment's effect. And it does this through the eye-opening stories of what is happeningdaily to thousands of people.
This book ends up confronting the fundamental dilemma of medical research: Participation in clinical trials plays a vital role in advancing knowledge, and many experts fear that if the information provided herein became widely known, fewer people would participate. But the authors demonstrate that there is no need to deceive people into participating in research. We can have a system that promotes participation while still providing truthful information to participants.

Brent admired the chimpanzee he sketched at the zoo. He regarded the animal as contemplative. He was unaware that similar animals in the wilds of Africa were the source of a virus that would lead to his death from AIDS. Brent became infected with HIV from the medicine he infused to treat his hemophilia. At six months of age, his parents were alarmed when they discovered bruises on his chest which led to the discovery of hemophilia. From that moment forward, he received frequent intravenous infusions of concentrate to treat recurrent bleeding episodes. Infusions of the medicine relieved pain and suffering from bleeding. His life seemed normal. Unexpectedly, Brent's life changed after the discovery of HIV contamination of the medicine. The medicine was manufactured from the plasma of paid blood donors. Unbeknownst to Brent, the plasma was polluted with HIV. The SIV in chimpanzees changed to become HIV in humans. But the chimpanzees were not the cause of the transfer of SIV in animals to HIV in humans. The change from SIV in animals to HIV in humans was the result of human activity. The change came about with the production of the hepatitis B vaccine. Who was responsible for the pollution of the hemophilia medicine with HIV and hepatitis viruses? Was Brent's death preventable?

How can dedicated health care ethics committees increase their effectiveness and demonstrate their value as essential moral resources for their organizations? Among the most effective and increasingly valued resources in the health care decision-making process is the institutional ethics committee. The Joint Commission (TJC) accredits and certifies more than 19,000 health care organizations in the United States, including hospitals, nursing homes, and home care agencies. As a condition of accreditation, TJC requires health care organizations to have available a standing multidisciplinary ethics committee, composed of physicians, nurses, attorneys, ethicists, administrators, and interested lay citizens. Many of these committees are well meaning but may lack the information, experience, skills, and formal background in bioethics needed to effectively address the range and complexity of the ethical issues that arise in clinical and organizational settings. Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees was conceived in 2007 to address the myriad responsibilities assumed by ethics committees. Using sample cases and accessible language, Linda Farber Post and Jeffrey Blustein explored applied bioethics, including informed consent and refusal, decision making and decisional capacity, truth telling, care at the beginning and end of life, palliation, justice in and access to health care services, and organizational ethics. In the third edition, Post and Blustein have thoroughly updated and reorganized the content and expanded the scope of the material, with special attention to changes in the health care landscape since the second edition was published in 2015. They also focus on communication between and among patients, care providers, and families, the demands of professionalism, the essential role that ethics committees can and should play, and how their effectiveness and value can be assessed. An entirely new chapter examines research ethics. The book also addresses the challenging ethical issues raised by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This guide remains an essential resource for all health care ethics committee and their members.

Genomics and Bioethics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Technologies and Advancements contributes to the existing gap in interdisciplinary research on comparative studies of cultural, social and ethical implications of genomics and bioinformatics. This work focuses on ethical, social, cultural, and legal implications of genetics, genomics and genetic databanking as they relate to concrete cultural and historical traditions.