Advance Care Planning Finally Gets CMS Support

Spite: Evolution Finally Gets Nasty

Partaking in this grisly feast are the larvae of a parasitoid wasp, Copidosoma floridanum. Like other wasps, Copidosoma are haplodiploid: Fertilized eggs produce females; unfertilized eggs become males. These wasps are also polyembryonic: Eggs split to produce many clonal embryos. A single host may contain multiple eggs from multiple females, resulting in a hodgepodge of genetic relationships. ...

The Brain Finally Gets Into the Act

The theory of clinical depression presented here integrates etiological factors, changes in specific structural and cellular substrates, ensuing symptomatology, and treatment and prevention. According to this theory, important etiological factors, such as stress, can suppress the production of new neurons in the adult human brain, thereby precipitating or maintaining a depressive episode. Most ...

Advance care planning in primary care.

Advance care planning and the older patient.

Making treatment decisions for older people is difficult, because of the complex interplay of their multiple co-morbidities, but also because of the fine balance of risks vs. benefit in any chosen management plan. This becomes even more difficult when they lose the capacity to tell us what they want, and often in such situations we have to rely on information from others in order to make decisi...

Autonomy, liberalism and advance care planning.

The justification for advance directives is grounded in the notion that they extend patient autonomy into future states of incompetency through patient participation in decision making about end-of-life care. Four objections challenge the necessity and sufficiency of individual autonomy, perceived to be a defining feature of liberal philosophical theory, as a basis of advance care planning. The...