Opinion: Armchair philosophizing doesn’t help conscious patients in vegetative states
“Imagine.” This word let a severely brain injured patient tell neuroscientists she was still conscious…
Category: First Opinion
Opinion: To maximize progress in global health, invest more in community health workers
Anna Mzeru’s day shifts as a nurse in a clinic in the Bagamoyo region of…
Opinion: I was fortunate to get post-23andMe genetic counseling. Everyone should have that option
A year ago, I was shivering in the pre-op room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center waiting…
Opinion: We need better regulation of stem cell therapies, especially rogue clinics
Rogue stem cell clinics continue to victimize hopeful patients seeking cures for cancer, Parkinson’s disease,…
Opinion: Open science, publishing, and public research support: Could Trump have it right?
In the three years since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, I have rarely supported…
Opinion: Novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV exposes a flaw in the Nagoya Protocol
As the number of people infected with the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV increases each day, scientists…
Opinion: In hospitals, housekeepers are truly the ‘keepers of the house’
Malcolm cleans patient rooms and offices in the large medical center where we both work…
Opinion: Clinician-led quality improvements can transform a hospital’s care
In hospitals across the country, doctors and nurses often feel like small cogs in very…
Opinion: What record-high funding for neglected diseases doesn’t tell us about R&D for them
In recent weeks, scientists have raced to understand the deadly new coronavirus and develop new tools…
Opinion: The ACA gave more Americans insurance, but not the health care they need
The signing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 ushered in the largest expansion in…
Opinion: Cash from cannabis companies creates conflicted researchers
Imagine that scientists charged with doing research on tobacco’s health implications were funded by tobacco…
Opinion: Preprints can fill a void in times of rapidly changing science
The rapid emergence in China of 2019-nCoV, a novel coronavirus, and its spread beyond its…
Opinion: A doctor-entrepreneur’s guide to socially responsible capitalism
As a doctor specializing in diseases and disorders of blood cells, I devoted my life…
Opinion: Abortion advice should be as safe as abortion itself
It’s completely reasonable for people to disagree about the morality of abortion. It’s completely unreasonable…
Opinion: Companies must responsibly manufacture the antimicrobials society needs
In a world challenged by microbes resistant to antibiotics, many medical interventions that rely on…
Opinion: Biotech can — and must — reshape the pricing debate and protect future innovation
The week before the craziness known as J.P. Morgan 2020 began, more than 300 biotech…
Opinion: ‘Small’ tactics to counter Big Pharma’s influence on medication overload
Money talks in Washington, D.C., and no sector of the economy speaks more loudly than…
Opinion: An ‘Epic’ pushback as U.S. prepares for new era of empowering patient health data
Epic, the largest electronic health record company in the U.S., launched an effort last week…
Opinion: Bird flu. SARS. China coronavirus. Is history repeating itself?
HONG KONG — Sometimes history seems to unspool in a continuous playback loop. That is…
Opinion: Epic’s call to block a proposed data rule is wrong for many reasons
Epic, the nation’s largest electronic health record (EHR) company and a major beneficiary of a…
Opinion: The cannabis boom could be good for science — and scientists
I’ve been a chemistry professor for 15 years and a chemist for longer than that….
Opinion: Using social norms to drive positive changes in health
Well-intentioned efforts to help others often backfire, but we can learn from our mistakes. Vaping…
Opinion: Questionable study casts a cloud over the 75th anniversary of water fluoridation
Seventy-five years ago, on Jan. 25, 1945, public health officials began an experiment in Grand…
Opinion: Pain doesn’t stigmatize people. We do that to each other
In 2000, a truck rear-ended my friend Andrea’s car as she stopped at a crosswalk…
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Opinion: Science education needs a reboot. LabXchange can help
What does it take to bring science alive from the pages of a book? A…
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Opinion: Former CDC director Tom Frieden on 3 key questions about the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China
There may or may not always be something new out of Africa, as the saying…
Opinion: A former CDC director on 3 key questions about the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China
There may or may not always be something new out of Africa, as the saying…
Opinion: Health care needs AI. It also needs the human touch
As friends who work as pediatricians, we’ve had several conversations recently about artificial intelligence and…
Opinion: States need to wake up to public health risks from cannabis
Cannabis is on the march. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical…
Opinion: Does ‘no more copays, no more deductibles’ really represent radical health care reform?
Lost in the shuffle of competing plans for saving health care is the radical call…
Opinion: We don’t need to ban vaping. We need to build better vaping devices
What’s the health care system to do when thousands of individuals, many of them between…
Opinion: Microglia: a new target in the brain for depression, Alzheimer’s, and more?
More than a decade ago, I was diagnosed with a string of autoimmune diseases, one…
Opinion: Goop’s pseudoscience ministry comes to Netflix
Gwyneth Paltrow’s reaction to the description of the vulva in episode three of her new…
Opinion: The public science behind the ‘Merck’ Ebola vaccine
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved an important vaccine against Ebola, five years…
Opinion: Using states as living laboratories to solve surprise medical billing
Although surprise billing has been the subject of vigorous debate in federal and state legislatures,…
Opinion: ‘Stuck in a tornado of life’: a patient’s chaos narrative
Cheryl overdosed on heroin — or so she’d hoped — the night before. But that’s…
Opinion: Innovation in biotech R&D: New resources offer new hope
Public optimism about American health care seems in short supply if you read the news,…
Opinion: The downside of strong growth in health care jobs: higher costs
Jobs growth soars (CNBC). November Job Growth Booms (USA Today). US economy smashes forecasts (Business…
Opinion: What roulette and basketball can teach Biogen about aducanumab
Say that one day you see me walk up to a roulette table and win…
Opinion: Welcome to the bioengineering culture clash
Bioengineering, once viewed primarily as an academic discipline, is growing up. Our ability to engineer…
Opinion: Some people in persistent vegetative states have working minds. Does keeping them in limbo amount to torture?
Imagine for a minute — or even for a few seconds — that your working…
Opinion: Did a high-profile program really slash hospital spending? Or was it a cautionary tale of ‘regression to the mean’?
In the late 19th century, English polymath Sir Francis Galton noted that tall parents often…
Opinion: Medicare policy on antirejection drugs imperils kidney transplants
For people with failing kidneys — and there are thousands of them in the United…
Opinion: A new biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry commitment to patients and the public
We,the undersigned leaders in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, academia, and life science investors, recognize…
Opinion: 3 legal challenges could derail out-of-network surprise medical bills
Surprise medical bills have become the bane of many Americans who are seen in emergency…
Opinion: Health care providers are unrecognized victims of mass killings. We’re doing little to support them
The night a gunman opened fire on a crowd of 20,000 at a Las Vegas…
Opinion: CRISPR babies scientist He Jiankui should not be villainized — or headed to prison
When I saw the news that He Jiankui and colleagues had been sentenced to three…
Opinion: He Jiankui is going to jail. Would the U.S. criminally prosecute a rogue gene-editing researcher?
On Monday, 13 months after He Jiankui announced that he had created the world’s first…
Opinion: Antibiotic resistance nearly killed me. That’s why I’m raising awareness of it
There are many reasons why people write about the looming threat of antibiotic resistance. Academics…
Opinion: Precision medicine has a blind spot: children with cancer
Cancer, once a terrifying black box, is slowly being opened up. Thanks to advances in…