Faculty Bibliography

Caplan talks about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's decision to ban large sugary drinks. Bloomberg proposed that no business in New York City should sell soda and other sugary drinks bigger than sixteen ounces. Keeping humongous containers of Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, A&W root beer, and other such calorie-infested potions off-limits might help trim the ever-expanding girth of New Yorkers. He admires the mayor for taking on gigantic portions of food and drink as a source of obesity. However, he notes that a ban on big sugary drinks both unfair and unlikely to have any impact on the obesity epidemic

There may once have been a time when doctors unquestioningly accepted the government's declaration of a drug's effectiveness and when patients unquestioningly accepted the prescriptions of their doctors. That time has passed. Now, information-good and bad-showers from all directions on patients and physicians alike. A filter is needed, and peer review provides the best one. But who or what is this validated information for? Ethically, its primary purpose is to enable patients to make decisions consistent with their values. Providing vetted information in a form that is useful to patients requires an emphasis on comprehensible, comprehensive, trustworthy, verifiable, and transparent communication. The hypothetical comparative effectiveness case study in this month's Health Affairs does not appear to rise to the level that would be helpful to providers or patients.

Discovering the genetic variations that create profiles of risk and drive individual responses to drugs and vaccines has proven more difficult than many initially presupposed. Rhetoric about the prospect of personalized medicine has exceeded the ability to deliver on that vision. There also remain significant ethical and policy obstacles that may hinder the arrival of personalized medicine. The emergence of new prenatal genetic tests make the resolution of these ethical challenges imperative.

The results showed that many people who filled out the traditional form did not feel they fit within the five government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian, Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native

For better or worse, the Democrats incorporated a good deal of mainstream Republican thinking about health care reform from the past decade, including mandated coverage and health insurance exchanges, into the Affordable Care Act