This article explores whether the current patent system strikes the optimal balance between providing incentives to inventors to bring new medical devices to the marketplace and promoting public health by ensuring that these medical devices are widely available at a reasonable price. After providing an overview of the relationship of patent law to medical devices, the author explains how ethica...

This article discusses – and rejects – cyberutopia, an idealized theory of internet use that requires users to leave their bodies behind when online. The author instead calls for a cyberfeminist perspective in relation to studying the internet and other new media, centrally locating corporeality and embodiment. The underutilized concept of intra-agency is then employed to develop liminality in ...

This article try to analyze why, although personalistic bioethics is expanding, there are so few theoretical studies on its characteristics and identity, and concludes it is due to a problem of lack of specificity. Personalistic bioethicists rely either on movements or institutions that have a weak theoretical foundation or in the realist philosophy taken in a very broad sense, which generates ...

Although prenatal screening is routinely undertaken as part of a woman's antenatal care, the ethics surrounding it are complex. In this paper, the author examines the Jewish position on the permissibility of several tests, including those for Down's syndrome and Tay-Sachs disease, the latter being especially common in the Jewish community. Clearly, the status of the tests depends on whether ter...

In this article, based on a speech to the European Association of Health Policy, the author discusses the political context in which health inequalities research has historically operated in the United States. The discussion focuses on the limitations of research that uses income, consumption, and status as the primary categories of research practice, and demonstrates these limitations by criti...

This Article provides an analytical framework for assessing state regulation regarding lay ownership of healthcare entities. The author suggests there are three categories of state regulation restraining lay ownership, each focused on a particular stakeholder in healthcare transactions: provider, patient, and payor. These regulatory paradigms are analyzed through a discussion of three state app...

After locating this article within an extrasomatic information processing framework, the author asserts that the use of the Web poses pedagogical challenges. Some of these perceived challenges are presented and discussed. The author also proposes that the debate surrounding the use of the Web in university teaching should centre around learning and not technical issues. The learning issues and ...