Disability and Ethics through the Life Cycle:
Cases, Controversies, & Finding Common Ground
CALL FOR PAPERS
May 21-22, 2010
Union College, Schenectady, NY
Despite a common interest in facilitating good medical care, bioethicists and members of the disability rights community sometimes differ in their approach to issues arising in the bio-medical settings, especially on such polarizing issues as abortion and physician-assisted suicide. Focusing on these polarizing issues, however, distracts attention from other ethical issues that affect people with disabilities in biomedical contexts. This conference will offer a forum for bioethicists, disability-rights scholars, disability-rights advocates, and other stakeholders with a different focus for discussing these issues by viewing disability from a life -cycle perspective. People confront disability through the life cycle: infancy, childhood, reproductive years, middle age, and old age. At each age they confront situations with ethical dimensions that present them, their families, and their caregivers and biomedical researchers with ethical challenges. This conference is designed to promote interdisciplinary conversations about these less frequently discussed ethical issues.
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20
January
Announcement and call for applications
*First European Seminar for Philosophy of the Life Sciences*
*/Causation and Disease in the Postgenomic Era/*
Hermance (Geneva), Switzerland, September 6-11, 2010
The Brocher Foundation and a Consortium of five leading European institutions in the philosophy of the life sciences are inviting postgraduate, doctoral and early career postdoctoral researchers in the philosophy of life sciences to submit applications for participation in the First European Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences, to be held on the premises of the Brocher Foundation in Hermance (Geneva), Switzerland, September 6-11, 2010. The *deadline for applications is February 22, 2010*.
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11
January
A couple of weeks back Allscripts' CEO Glen Tullman was on the Cats & Dogs panel at Health 2.0 and he said some pretty controversial things about the state of EMR adoption (yes it was happening), certification of meaningful use (it was being diluted and the tax payer faced being ripped off) and other vendors, or at least one other vendor from small town Wisconsin that wasn't playing fair in the quest for interoperability).
Given that I always enjoy talking to Glen and also that he's as responsible as anyone else for getting Obama interested in the concept of why EMRs and automating health care matters (and therefore why there was so much money in both Obama's campaign pledges and in the stimulus package for EMRs), I thought it would be fun to have Glen back on THCB to expand a little on what he told us at Health 2.0. And yes there was plenty more interesting stuff where that came from. (Be warned, the sound quality is not great, but its completely understandable)
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27
October
If you ever wonder why the efforts to make it easier for patients and families to get information and be treated as equals in their care by themedical care system matter....
If you need convincing that the concept of participatory medicine is important enough for its own society, advocates & journal….
If you wonder whether it’s OK to wait to phase in the possibility of patients actually having rights to their own data….
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24
October
I hope to use this post to motivate my good friends at Google Health into taking a much morepublic, visible, and proactive role in the health conversation. More importantly, it is a call to Google HQ to wake up to the opportunity within health care to leverage their current tools and technology to create a platform that others can use to enable the creation of a next generation health system.
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13
August
Call for Submissions:
End of Life Stories
Creative Nonfiction is seeking new essays that explore death, dying, and end of life care, for a collection to be published by Southern Methodist University Press. We’re looking for stories that transcend the “I” and find universal meaning in personal experiences. We hope to include stories representing a wide variety of perspectives—from physicians, nurses,hospice workers, social workers, counselors, clergy, funeral directors,family members, and others. We want narratives that capture, illustrate and/or explain the best way to approach the end of life, as well as stories that highlight current features, flaws, and advances in the healthcare system and their impact on professionals, patients, and families.
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3
July
In summer we feel particularly acute sense of loneliness. All, women and men, live waiting for love, hoping to meet their halves, twist a love nest. However, these hopes often do not come true …
Why we meet more and more disillusioned people, who do not believe in love, that it can meet them behind any turn, at a nearby cafe’s table, just stretch your hand, and it will touch your open palm? Perhaps we should blame our children experience we gained in parental home … Perhaps, we want too much of another person … We believe that not we ourselves, but someone else will make us happy … Maybe it is a bitter experience …
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25
May
Have you ever regretted about a useless weekend? Not that the weekend passed without any benefit, but everything was as usual, and you did not have a good rest. Boring, uninteresting. The other case, when the weekend is full of events, literally, you even have no time to relax. And despite expected fatigue, you feel energy on Monday morning. This is because holidays were interesting. A person that lives an interesting life, feels happy. Therefore, an interesting life is what is sought. We can offer the following three effective ways to make life more interesting, dispel melancholy and boredom.
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25
May
Call for Papers
Special Issue of Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies
(JLCDS)
Human Conditions: Disability and Life Writing
Guest Editor, G. Thomas Couser
Papers welcome on any aspect of this broad topic. I wish to encourage
breadth across time, across cultures, and across media: thus, “life
writing” should be understood to include non- print media (such as blogs)
and even non- written forms of representation, such as documentary film,
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17
May
George Halverson is the CEO of Kaiser Permanente, and the driving force behind both the HealthConnect EMR implementation and a national player in the health reform debate. I got to talk to him at HIMSS where he’d just finished givingthe Monday keynote. We discussed KP HealthConnect, and the impact it’s having internally (good), why KP is making such a high-profile fuss about it (no, they’re not planning on expanding nationally or internationally),what AHIP and the insurers might face in the future (a choice between Canada and Switzerland), whether chronic care management can work without integration (he says yes), and whether the big guys will cast the smaller insurers adrift. You’ll have to watch for that answer.
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8
April