NASA’s recent grapple with ‘who-gets-thrown-from-the-lifeboat’ questions has caught my attention, as I a physicist and bioethicist. NASA’s questions (below) are not new, merely varied circumstances from the quandaries that arise in healthcare decision-making, daily, during disasters such as a Hurricane Katrina and 9-11 and in all-hazard disaster preparedness planning. With a Mars landing scheduled to [...]

Prostate Cancer Screening: Why It’s Not for Every Man:  Screening for prostate cancer in men age 50 and older is common in clinical practice today, but it’s not based on adequate evidence that it improves health outcomes. That’s why the US Preventive Services Task Force, the leading independent panel of experts in prevention, has found [...]

Sensitive information on about 1,000 patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals was exposed in a security breach, sparking identity theft concerns and an investigation by the Army.
Names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and other information was released, hospital officials said Monday. The computer file that was breached did not include information [...]