Category: Bioethics Education

(KFF Health News) – Patients are getting stuck in the emergency department for days while waiting for a spot in an inpatient ward.

We had already learned the hard way that if you need admission to the hospital, you can remain in the emergency department — in the hallway or a curtained bay on a hard stretcher or in a makeshift holding area — for more than 24 hours, even for days, while waiting for a real hospital bed. In this limbo state, you’re technically admitted to the hospital, but still located in the physical domain of the ER. And the rules governing acceptable care and safety measures become much less clear. (Read More)

(AFP via 24 France) – Christine Li is a model and influencer, but not an actor, so when she saw herself playing a cruel character in a Chinese microdrama she felt bewildered, then angry and afraid.

The 26-year-old is one of two people who told AFP their likenesses were cast without consent in the AI-generated show “The Peach Blossom Hairpin”, which ran on Hongguo, a major microdrama app owned by Tiktok parent company ByteDance. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Cognitive exercises offered by a bot named Sunny, paired with telehealth visits, can be ‘physical therapy for the brain’

NewDays requires patients to have telehealth visits, usually every two weeks, with its staff of doctors, then talk to Sunny via a website in between the appointments. During the telehealth visits, staff will instruct patients on cognitive exercises, which they can then practice with the bot.

Co-founder Daniel Kelly likens the approach to physical therapy for the brain. He also says the technology relieves some traditional pain points. Often, loved ones take notes during appointments and conduct the practice sessions between visits, Kelly says. “We don’t put the burden on the caregiver. We rely on the AI to do that.” (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – In March, I put my iPhone into a yellow cardboard box with MO stamped on top—the M looked like a riff on the Motorola logo; the O looked like a flower. Over the next several weeks, I left my phone there for roughly 23.5 hours out of every day.

I did so as a participant in “Month Offline,” which started last year in Washington, D.C., as a kind of Dry January challenge, but for smartphones. Now it is a fledgling business with a footprint in New York City. Members of each monthlong “cohort” pay $75 for the experience, during which they swap their iPhones for a lower-tech device and participate in weekly meetups. I joined the cohort that began on March 2 and received an email just before the first meeting: “Excited 2 see u soon,” it said. (Read More)

(NYT) – From the Kremlin to Silicon Valley, some of the most powerful people in the world now want something more: eternal life.

But what if the tyrant succeeds in making himself immortal, or in expanding his allotted life span so radically that he might as well be? What if autocrats like Xi or Putin were to extend their rule by decades, or even to rule indefinitely, never relinquishing their grip on their respective states, on the lives of their citizens? Such a prospect is, to say the least, still scientifically remote. But that these two leaders seem to want it in the first place, and seem to believe that science might facilitate it, suggests something important about our political era — and hints at the shape of the era to come. (Read More)

(MIT Technology Review) – The tools may be accurate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll improve health outcomes.

Or that it is being used, increasingly, in hospitals. Doctors are using AI to help them with notetaking. AI-based tools are trawling through patient records, flagging people who may require certain support or treatments. They are also used to interpret medical exam results and X-rays.

A growing number of studies suggest that many of these tools can deliver accurate results. But there’s a bigger question here: Does using them actually translate into better health outcomes for patients?

We don’t yet have a good answer. (Read More)

(The Guardian) – In feat hailed as milestone in robotics, Sony AI’s Ace wins three out of five matches played under official rules

An AI-powered robot has beaten elite players at table tennis in a significant achievement for a machine faced with human athletes in a real-world competitive sport.

Named Ace, the robotic system developed by Sony AI, won three out of five matches against elite players, but lost the two it played against professionals, clawing back only one game in the seven contests. (Read More)

(Wired) – Paterna Biosciences says it has determined the set of instructions needed to turn sperm-making stem cells into “normal, mature” sperm.

A startup out of Utah, Paterna Biosciences, says it has successfully grown functional human sperm in a lab and used the sperm to make visibly healthy-looking embryos. The technique could eventually help men with certain types of infertility have biological children.

The findings have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal or independently verified. WIRED is the first to report the advance. (Read More)

(NYT) – The report found that the shots cut the likelihood of hospitalizations, but the agency’s acting head said it gave an inaccurate picture of the vaccines’ effectiveness.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who has been overseeing the agency’s operations in the absence of a director, objected to the study’s design, saying it painted an inaccurate picture of the vaccine’s effectiveness.

The study, conducted by C.D.C. scientists, calculated the effectiveness of Covid shots by looking at the vaccination status of people who had sought care at hospitals and emergency rooms. It found that vaccination cut the likelihood of emergency visits due to Covid by 50 percent and of hospitalizations by 55 percent, according to a summary of the study viewed by The New York Times. (Read More)

(Axios) – Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new push to loosen federal restrictions on peptides could be a bonanza for telehealth companies, compounding pharmacies and longevity clinics looking for the next big wellness trend.

Why it matters: The heavily touted but loosely regulated proteins could fuel the kind of boom we’ve seen with weight-loss drugs — even though there’s little evidence they work in humans. (Read More)

(NBC News) – By 2035, rectal cancer death rates could exceed deaths from colon cancer, new research suggests.

Deaths from rectal cancer are rising rapidly among younger adults, an alarming trend that is confounding scientists trying to understand why millennials are so hard-hit.

“The rate of rectal cancer seems to be increasing more than two to three times compared to colon cancer,” said Mythili Menon Pathiyil, lead author of a new study and a gastroenterology fellow at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York.

If the trend continues, rectal cancer deaths will exceed the number of colon cancer deaths — already the nation’s No. 1 cause of cancer death in people under age 50 — by 2035. (Read More)

(The Economist) – SORRY, YOUNGER siblings. On standard measures of success, such as educational achievement and income, first-borns do better. Why? Stereotypes cast eldest children as responsible and younger ones as rebellious—but large-scale studies find no meaningful link between birth order and personality types. New research points to something rather different: germs. (Read More)

(WSJ) – After an uproar among oncologists, the FDA last fall agreed to reconsider RP1 and selected a second panel to eliminate what it called “bias.” Dr. Prasad believed the first panel was biased because it recommended the drug. So he tapped new reviewers who shared his bias against the drug. But even these reviewers didn’t say the drug wasn’t effective.

The FDA rejection letter instead said it is unclear whether the drug was effective based on contrived reasoning that Mr. Kennedy parroted: Replimune only did a “one arm trial, and all the people who were tested also received a chemotherapy drug, so we don’t know what the effect was,” Mr. Kennedy said. Fact-check: No patients in the trial received chemotherapy. (Read More)