Is helping the lay public better understand how to interpret health information accurately – in the face of widely disseminated misinformation – one of the pressing challenges for today’s bioethicists?

The June 6, 2012 New York Times carried an article that may illustrate this point perfectly: “Abortion Qualms on Morning-After Pill May Be Unfounded.” The article highlights how politics-driven misinformation is so difficult to counter or contradict, even with sound medical and scientific data. Apparently, for some politicians just saying that emergency contraceptives are “abortive pills” is enough to make it so. Of course, there are other recent examples of this phenomenon too, such as Michele Bachmann claiming that HPV vaccine might cause “mental retardation.”

Regardless, if nothing else, clinical ethics is all about informed consent. Informed consent – in a nutshell – is met when the physician shares with the patient information about the working diagnosis, the available intervention options and prognoses, the benefits and burdens of each option (including the possibility of no intervention at all) and the likely outcomes, and the physician and patient – using a shared-decision making model – agree on an immediate course or plan to implement.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers graduate online masters in bioethics programs. For more information on the AMBI master of bioethics online program, please visit the AMBI site.

Medicine as treatment or medicine as healing? Despite facile responses, these two constructions are distinct. It is possible that the failure to distinguish between the the modalities of treatment and healing is responsible for much of the current health care mess. Such failure may also account in large part for the abject failure of medicine to provide meaningful solutions to the epidemics of type II diabetes and overweight/obesity. Similarly, when a person ill with cancer or a person ill with a cardiovascular disorder encounters the health care system, the orientation of his physicians to treatment or healing will have a significant impact on the person’s long-term health and well-being.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers graduate online masters in bioethics programs. For more information on the AMBI master of bioethics online program, please visit the AMBI site.

Ethics as a foundation of human affairs is fast disappearing from our world. The litany of human selfishness, crassness, and sheer bad behavior is unending. Whether the topic is Wall Street robber barons betting against securities they sold to clients (who naively trusted their “bankers” and purchased the recommended financial instruments in good faith) or the venality and mendacity of congressional “representatives” whose true loyalty is to those who fill their campaign war chests rather than to the citizens who elected them and foolishly count on their wisdom and judgement, the public arena and daily news cycle are replete with cautionary tales of failed trust.

So it can't be a surprise that our own brief period of prominence is seemingly bereft of any substantive ethical framework. Ethics provides solutions to every problem humanity is facing. The problem is that ethics is in short supply. Implicitly, thinking is in very short supply. This assertion is awfully ironic, as the primary difference between humans and all other species is self-knowledge. Humans know that we know. But if we don’t know much, we’re not going to be able to help ourselves. Now more than at any time in history, our survival advantage depends on our being able to take care of each other. But we have never done a very good job of that. Not even close.

The Alden March Bioethics Institute offers graduate online masters in bioethics programs. For more information on the AMBI master of bioethics online program, please visit the AMBI site.