Category: Medicine

July 22, 2014

The Medical Challenge — A Post by John S. Haller Jr.

The following post is by John S. Haller Jr., author of Shadow Medicine: The Placebo in Conventional and Alternative Therapies: “The placebo has undermined the positivist model of biomedicine by interjecting subjectivity, uncertainty, and ambiguity into the clinical encounter. It...

September 4, 2013

Peter Rabins: "Three-Facet Model of Causality"

This week our featured book is The Why of Things: Causality in Science, Medicine, and Life, by Peter Rabins. Today, we are featuring another article by Peter Rabins on his unique three facet model approach to causality. And, don’t forget...

June 21, 2013

Donna Dickenson: Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good

“Under the pressure of corporate interests and neoliberal policies, we’ve lost sight of the idea of the commons in biomedicine—but it has only disappeared temporarily from view. Reclaiming biotechnology for the greater good will involve resurrecting the commons.”—Donna Dickenson In...

June 20, 2013

Donna Dickenson on How Neoliberalism Is Shaping Science and Medicine

“Who would have predicted twenty years ago that you could get people to pay to … have a spit sample ana­lyzed to predict their personal propensity to common diseases?”—Donna Dickenson, Me Medicine vs. We Medicine In the following excerpt from...

June 19, 2013

Donna Dickenson, author of Me Medicine vs. We Medicine, Takes the Page 99 Test

“We risk losing sight of the common good in biotechnology—what I call ‘We Medicine’—in our haste to embrace personalized healthcare.”–Donna Dickenson The Page 99 Test asks authors to turn to page 99 in their books and explain how the page...

June 18, 2013

Donna Dickenson — Me Medicine vs. We Medicine

“I ask this crucial question: how did we move from what was originally presented as a communitarian vision for the new genetic biomedicine to the now-dominant personalized medicine paradigm?”—Donna Dickenson The following post is by Donna Dickenson, author of Me...

January 18, 2013

Read an Excerpt from our Book of the Week: Jonathan Kahn's Race in a Bottle

This week, we’ve brought you an interview and author post from Jonathan Kahn, Hamline Law Professor and expert on BiDil, the first race-specified drug approved by the FDA (click here for the story of BiDil). To wrap up our feature...

January 17, 2013

Jonathan Kahn – Is the Patent Office Forcing Race into Biotechnology Patents?

One of the most significant things you’ll learn from Jonathan Kahn’s new book, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, is that racial discourse surfaces within most all of the vertically integrated...

January 16, 2013

An Interview with Race in a Bottle author Jonathan Kahn

Earlier this week, we posted on BiDil, the first FDA-approved drug with a race-specific indication on its label. In the following interview with Columbia University Press, Jonathan Kahn, author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized...

January 15, 2013

The Story of BiDil: the FDA's First Race-Specific Drug

Hamline University Law Professor Jonathan Kahn has become a prominent critical voice in the last decade on the controversial injection of racial discourse into American medical practice (particularly in the realm of genetically tailored drugs). In the following post, he...

May 17, 2012

An excerpt from The Epigenetics Revolution, by Nessa Carey

An excerpt from Nessa Carey’s excellent introduction to and explanation of the field of epigenetics, The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance.

June 8, 2011

Brent Stockwell: The National Institutes of Health and the Drug Discovery Crisis

Brent R. Stockwell is the author of The Quest for the Cure: The Science and Stories Behind the Next Generation of Medicines, and Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biological Sciences at Columbia University, and an Early Career Scientist of the...