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April 28, 2016
Different models have defined the term disability and grouped persons with disabilities accordingly. Time and again, various terms and phrases have been used in different languages to identity persons according to the differences in their bodies and the level of functioning of those bodies. Analo...
June 15, 2016
At a recent cardiology conference in New Delhi, the cardiologist Deepak Natarajan raised the concern that commercial conflicts of interest were corrupting medical journals. Natarajan cited "manipulated" publications in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) as one example to support ...
July 04, 2016
Screening is the detection of disease at a point in its natural history when it is not yet symptomatic. In the natural history of dental caries, for example, the incipient lesions are at a reversible stage, which is a pre-symptomatic or an unrecognised symptomatic disease. Ideally, this is the st...
May 09, 2016
End-stage renal disease (ESRD) is a condition better discussed than suffered. People suffering from ESRD are at a disadvantage not only financially, but also emotionally and in terms of the quality of their lives.
The majority of their productive time is spent in hospital, on dia...
May 05, 2016
India has suffered several natural disasters in recent years. The super cyclone of Orissa in 1999 and the tsunami on the southeastern coast in 2004, both led to major developments in disaster management abilities in the country. Almost a decade after the last major disaster that hit south India, ...
May 05, 2016
Dr Robert Leopold Spitzer (May 22, 1932–December 25, 2015), the architect of modern psychiatric diagnostic criteria and classification, died recently at the age of 83 in Seattle. Under his leadership, the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals (DSM) became the...
May 05, 2016
"Ethic: from ethos, character, L ethos, adopted by English especially in sense of 'character and spirit of a people'. Intimately akin to Gr ethos, custom, Skt. sva-dha one's own doing or action; sva self (cf suicide) + dha to self."
February 17, 2016
Some ethical aspects of the management of the Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone which started in January 2014, have been questionable. First, as regards the prevention of the spread of the virus, the necessary epidemiological investigations on the origin of the infection were not...
December 07, 2015
Recent scientific evidence suggests that early initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) among infants exposed perinatally to HIV has beneficial effects on their health and survival, and may even induce remission. This has led to the roll-out of early infant diagnosis (EID) of HIV and early trea...
December 10, 2015
Aruna Shanbaug (born 1948) passed away on May 18, 2015 and the coverage that the news got on the front pages and the primetime news slots surprised everyone. One wonders whether this news would have got so much coverage had it not involved the sensational euthanasia debate. That Aruna should have...