Novo Nordisk increases transparency in clinical trials and bioethics

Novo Nordisk is taking the lead in communicating with the public through the launch of two new websites dedicated to clinical trials and bioethics respectively. Both sites are aimed at a wide target group including patients, doctors, investors, experts and the general public. Read more...

(editorial note: BEI reviews healthcare organizations' guidelines to ensure responsible action benefiting individuals and humanity and to enable organizations to proudly communicate their procedures.

AMA meeting: CEJA to study how ethics may shift during disasters

After disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami following the Indian Ocean earthquake, physicians say they need ethical guidance on triage and other matters in catastrophic situations. More than 20 delegates expressed their concerns to the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs at the AMA Annual Meeting last month. Read more...

(editorial note: BEI prepares and empowers doctors and nurses to make the difficult life-death and resource allocation decisions in catastrophes with our decision-making framework)

But now, that critical decision may be turned over to a sophisticated computer program. New software should soon be able to predict more accurately than loved ones how comatose patients would choose to be treated, if they were able to make the decision themselves. Read more...

Why can't you buy a kidney to save your life? (A right to 'medical self-defense'?)

There is a growing push in medical, legislative, and legal circles - both liberal and conservative - to recognize an expansive new right that some are describing as "medical self-defense." The movement is rooted in a desire to help patients who have run out of options. Some medical experts, including the director of a leukemia research program at the University of Texas, have called on the Food and Drug Administration to let terminally ill patients try unapproved drugs that might offer their last chance at survival. And Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas is working to introduce legislation that would force the FDA to do just that.

Even more significant is a potential landmark case before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals - brought by a group called the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs - that could make access to unapproved drugs a full-blown constitutional right. Last year, a panel of three judges on the appellate court declared that patients with terminal diseases ought to have access to unapproved drugs, surprising many legal scholars. The case is now being considered by all 10 members of the court, and a decision is expected this year.

The decision could have sweeping implications. A right to medical self-defense, some legal scholars argue, implies that there is a right to offer cash for human organs, if one is dying or suffering - a practice currently banned. Such a right could even force the courts to overturn any federal ban on stem-cell research because, these scholars argue, the government's interest in protecting a 10-cell embryo could not trump the right of a Parkinson's patient to save himself. If you can shoot a man who breaks into your house at 1 a.m., they ask, why can't you try an unproven drug or purchase an organ? Read more...