Practice & Policy: Aligning the Practice of Medicine with Accelerating Science We focused the past four issues on regenerative medicine—a form of “postmodern” medicine likely to change the way many conditions are treated. There is no question that regenerative medicine will become mainstream at some point, but in light of the fact that many aspects […]

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The World Economic Forum attributes to a “deterioration of the political and regulatory environment” a measured decline in innovation in the US, relative to (mainly) European countries and Singapore. Some US cities may also start to measure a decline in available nurses, thanks to a Virgin Islands health system which on March 1 began a […]

The current good health of the US healthcare industry contains the seeds of its own destruction, say some analysts – and it will drag the rest of the US economy down with it, unless other sectors mobilize to wrest control from the powerful healthcare lobby. Growing corporate support for government-mandated universal care may be a […]

We tend to think of the provision of healthcare services as a local activity. So it may be; but in theGlobal Village, the top US hospitals have figured out that Singapore, Dubai, and Panama are local, too. Mexico is even more local, from a US perspective. Those who argue that the free market is a […]

Despite upward trends in aging, population growth, and obesity, an estimated 2 percent drop in annual deaths in the US in 2004 is probably attributable partly to modern medicine. This good news notwithstanding, health outcomes for elder Americans are apparently worse than for elder Britons, despite more than double the per-capital expenditure on health in […]

The law has been retroactive (perhaps inevitably, though that is debatable) in dealing with the effects of new technologies. Efforts under way at leading US law schools to become more proactive in anticipating technology’s effects may be necessary if the institution of law is to remain relevant and credible in the age of acceleration. Acceleration […]

While Japan seeks to improve its position in basic science research, India is taking advantage of the restrictions placed on the US biotechnology industry to fill the resulting vacuum in cloning and embryonic stem cell research, and it has the resources and ethics to succeed. Meanwhile, some medical device manufacturers and physicians have been taking […]

If physician house calls make sense — and they do on both cost and quality grounds — how much more sense does it make to bring the house to the doctor, via telemedical home-monitoring equipment? The telemedical physician’s armamentarium of remote EKGs, digital blood pressure cuffs, etc., may soon be bolstered by Doppler-radar-driven vital-sign detectors […]

Three of four methods proposed by President Bush’s Council on Bioethics for getting around the ethical problems of using embryonic stem cells for research appear to be non-starters. But one might work. In any event, neither ethics nor the chilling effect of White House policy on stem cell research in the US has been enough […]

Our growing ability to detect elements at nanoscale is timely, given concerns over the health effects of nanomaterials. The US government is funding several projects to research the those effects, though critics say it is not enough given the dangers. * * * A cancer patient who was one of only a small percentage of […]