Perspectives in Biology and Medicine最新文献

This personal essay details a psychiatrist's experience of her female patient's dissociation, which led to questions about the role of women in society. A brief review of societal norms reveals that women have always presented in medicine with disguised disorders. Collaboration with a neurologist and a team of like-minded providers leads to the development of a nonepileptic seizure (NES) disorder clinic.

Reproductive autonomy is an integral aspect of female reproduction, but this autonomy is endangered by the control and surveillance of pregnant bodies by institutional structures, laws, and cultural norms. These restrictions deprive women of the freedom to make informed choices, ranging from decisions concerning prenatal care and reproductive procedures to abortion, violating fundamental human rights and bodily autonomy. This article examines how Kalki Koechlin's graphic memoir The Elephant in the Womb (2021) advances and nuances the discourses surrounding reproductive autonomy and offers insights into how graphic reproduction narratives contribute to developing reproductive rights discourse.

This article proposes a memetic approach towards the history and current high prevalence of obesity in human societies. Due to the apparent absence of genetic evolution related to obesity, a traditional gene-culture coevolutionary perspective may no longer be valid. A memetic approach helps to identify decisive historical steps in the formation of the obesogenic environment. Memetics may be even more useful for interpretating current obesity-related debates on the internet, and it may also partially explain the usually modest success of healthy lifestyle-oriented public health campaigns. Thus, the authors recommend the use of positive memetics as part of the social marketing of healthy diets and lifestyles.

Publication of scientific and biomedical manuscripts in "high impact factor" (IF) journals is important in advancing careers, obtaining funding, and developing a field of research. Rejection by prestigious journals is not infrequent and usually painful, especially to young investigators. Reasons provided by an editor are often confusing. We assess the language of the rejection letter from a specific philosophical stance, originated by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's late writings on language as usage and as inherent to human activity have profoundly influenced many of the humanities but have been less frequently applied to the sciences. However, Wittgenstein's ideas about language have relevance for understanding editorial correspondence and also, more broadly, for our thinking about scientific work and "science."

This article presents a novel pedagogical approach for teaching ethical decision-making to health-care leaders, offered through a collaboration between the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and the Advanced Ethics in Leadership Program (AELP). The approach centers on the AELP Triple-A Framework, which guides participants through the process of identifying ethical issues, analyzing competing values, and developing strategic, context-sensitive action plans. Unlike traditional medical ethics education that often focuses on patient-physician relationships and clinical challenges, this model emphasizes leadership challenges within complex health-care organizations and trains clinicians and health leaders to respond ethically and effectively to systemic pressures. The framework is taught through immersive, implementation-focused workshops that combine pre-readings, case-based exercises, small-group collaboration, and iterative feedback. A featured case study on physician unionization illustrates how participants used the framework to move beyond technical solutions and engage deeply with questions of professional identity, institutional culture, and ethical leadership. Through this exercise, participants reconceived unionization not merely as a labor dispute but as a reflection of deeper organizational and moral tensions. The workshop model fosters the development of ethical leadership skills that are both principled and practical, enabling clinicians to navigate the evolving challenges of contemporary health care with moral clarity and strategic competence.

One of the major challenges facing health-care organizations is the well-being of clinicians. The goal of this article is to show how organizations are constrained by a neoliberal logic that has imported a factory-based organizational model into health care, resulting in alienation from work, feelings of betrayal and mistrust, and ultimately moral injury for physicians. If this damage is to be repaired, we must seek to understand the organizational sickness now afflicting health care and work to restore agency and trust to health-care workers and patients alike.

The ethical obligations of health-care delivery organizations are complex, often generating deep disagreements about what justice requires of organizations operating within unjust social conditions. This article maps such disagreements onto the implicit tension between ideal and nonideal perspectives on justice and offers a dynamic way of bridging them. The ideal-nonideal tension and its potential resolution are illustrated with an organizational ethics case on social and medical care integration. By identifying and relating ideal and nonideal perspectives in a dynamic framework, the authors offer a new set of analytic and pragmatic tools by which health-care managers can navigate a broad range of complex questions of organizational ethics and health justice.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease in the world and appears to be an emerging epidemic in Africa, where counteractive measures have become necessary. Previous reports have highlighted the limited epidemiological and clinical PD research in Africa but overlooked the poor preclinical PD research output of the continent. Because preclinical research is a bedrock for translating basic scientific research into clinical practice, a weak preclinical research foundation can hamper advancement in epidemiological and clinical investigations. The sparsity and low impact of preclinical PD research output in African countries compared to high-resource countries underscores the need for pragmatic measures to close the research gap. An improved funding of brain research in African institutions-ensuring provision of facilities and infrastructure for cutting-edge research, adequate remuneration for researchers, and policies to curtail brain drain-will stimulate preclinical PD research in Africa and contribute to stemming the spiraling global PD incidence.