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Beginning of End for Texas Futile Care Law?

Readers of Secondhand Smoke know how adamantly opposed I am to futile care theory. Texas, as the moment, is the prime offender. The law permits hospital ethics committees to order the refusal of wanted life-sustaining treatment, at which point, the patient and family have a mere ten days to find . . . . Continue Reading »

Stem Cell Therapies Not Risk Free

Every medical treatment has some risk associated with it, even those which are clearly established and undoubtedly efficacious. This includes adult/umbilical cord blood therapies, such as using bone marrow to treat leukemia. Case in point: World famous musher Susan Butcher died recently of . . . . Continue Reading »

Fetal Farming for Cosmetic Purposes

There is a terrible story (how often I have to write those words!) in the Daily Mail (UK) about women getting beauty treatments from fetal stem cells derived from abortions, with the allegation that poor women in the Ukraine are being paid $200 US to get pregnant and abort at 12 weeks for this . . . . Continue Reading »

CNN: Stem Cell Therapies Years Away

This is a better story than most about the stem cell debate. Except, of course, that CNN and the quoted scientists state that stem cell therapies are years away—without mentioning that for many human conditions they are already in human trials. But those don’t count. They aren’t . . . . Continue Reading »

Embryos More Than "Potential" Human Beings

Apparently the Wall Street Journal editorialized that embryos are not yet human beings, that is, the are only potential human life. I didn’t see the editorial. But I did see this excellent letter to the editor, published in response. I don’t know who James J. Johanik of Chicago is, but . . . . Continue Reading »

Utter Stem Cell Ignorance

Is it any wonder that people are confused about stem cell research? Take this article published by Tiscali.Europe, apparently one of the continent’s premier providers of internet services, as one example of hopeless cluelessness. (I bring this up because millions of people may have accessed . . . . Continue Reading »

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