This activity is comprised of five multiple-choice questions based on the content of an AMA Journal of Ethics podcast about key ideas from disability ethics that can inform our thinking about age-related biases and how medicalizing aging affects our health,…
Advances in epigenetic age estimation are now applied in actuarial science to make risk assessment more precise. But such health insurance underwriting practices pose ethical and legal questions about discrimination, privacy, and equity in biological data use. Legal adaptations, such…
Documenting one’s assessment of a patient’s physical appearance during a clinical encounter is regarded as a key element in a clinician’s overall judgment of a patient’s health. This article considers ethically and clinically relevant uses and misuses of such appraisals…
This commentary on a case considers how clinicians should help patients interpret results of tests that might be personally meaningful but not clinically actionable. Tests of biological age, for example, can easily lead to patient misunderstandings that can increase risks…
Of all infectious disease events, pandemics could result in significant human depopulation in this Anthropocene epoch or even in the next few centuries. Existential factors that exacerbate pandemic risk include global warming, overpopulation, habitat loss, permafrost thawing, geopolitical conflict, and…
Most physicians do not see, or learn to see, nuclear war threat mitigation as within the scope of their professional duties. This commentary on a case argues there are 2 reasons why physicians, in particular, should draw on their unique…
This commentary on a case builds on recent literature on climate change, health, and human extinction to argue in favor of a new clinical specialty: extinction medicine. If based on precise application of scientific findings about species extinction, disaster prevention…
This article draws a parallel between ethical reasons why people alive today have obligations to members of future generations and ethical reasons why physicians have obligations, besides helping improve patients’ quality of life, to help some patients confront their own…
Is there an important ethical difference between a global catastrophe that causes human extinction and one that does not? This commentary on a case introduces 3 approachesóequivalence, further-loss, and pro-extinctionistóin responding to this question. In particular, focus is placed on…
This activity is comprised of five multiple-choice questions based on the content of an AMA Journal of Ethics podcast about nuclear proliferation and planetary health. The featured guests are Joseph Hodgkin, MD, an attending hospitalist physician at Massachusetts General Hospital…
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