Bioethics for the People

This episode features Devan’s famous TikTok dancing, and, perhaps more interestingly, Dr. Alyssa Burgart about professionalism, medical education, bioethics, and host of other topics.

Dr. Burgart specializes in pediatric anesthesia and pediatric abdominal transplant anesthesia. She has special interest in transplantation, PANS/PANDAS, spinal muscular atrophy, and trauma. Dr. Burgart is committed to finding the most successful way for each child to interact with the anesthesia team, in order to create an overall positive experience. She champions a program specifically supporting children with unique needs, such as those with sensory integration differences. Dr. Burgart has a joint appointment in the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, serves as the Co-Chair of the LPCH Ethics Committee and as a member of the SHC Ethics Committee. She provides ethics consultation services for people of all ages. Her ethics interests include pediatric ethics, organ transplantation, communication skills, disability rights, women's healthcare access, adolescent decision-making, ethics education, and excellence in ethics consultation. She also is active on Twitter @BurgartBioethix

Read More of Dr. Burgart’s work below:

• “Vaccinate Me, But not First,” (Bioethics.net)

• “Poorly Conducted Science is Unprofessional,” (Journal of Vascular Surgery)

• “Machine-Learning Implementation in Clinical Anesthesia: Opportunities and Challenges,” (Anesthesia & Analgesia)

• “Fairness and Transparency in an Expanded Access Program: Allocation of the only treatment for SMA1,” (American Journal of Bioethics)

In this episode, Devan and Tyler discuss how vaccine distribution is going and whether or not it is ethical to mandate people to take the vaccine.

More Reading:

• “Here’s Why the Distribution of the Vaccine is Taking Longer than Expected,” New York Times

• “Houston Hospital Offers Workers $500 to get Covid-19 Vaccine” CBS News

• “Can your Employer Force you to get a Covid-19 Vaccine? CBS News

Some folks may be surprised that in many hospitals across the country there are ethicists wandering the halls. In this episode, Tyler and Devan chat with Dr. Virginia Bartlett about clinical ethics. Who are clinical ethicists, what do they do, when would they be involved in the care of patients?

Read more of Dr. Bartlett’s published work here:

• “Retrieving the Moral in the Ethics of Maternal-Fetal Surgery: A Response to ‘Fetal Repair of Open Neural Tube Defects’ by Radic, Illes, McDonald” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics (2020)

• “When the Fall is All There is…”: Refocusing on the Critical (Unique?) Characteristics of “Dying” in Physician Aid-in-Dying, American Journal of Bioethics (2019)

• “Exploring Clinical Ethics’ Past to Imagine its Possible Futures(s)” American Journal of Bioethics (2018)

In this Episode, Devan and Tyler link up with Brian Doak and Leah Payne, co-hosts of the award-winning Weird Religion podcast. They all discuss futurists, transhumanism, the afterlife, and the Amazon Prime series “Upload.”

• Check out other episodes from Weird Religion podcast here

• ‘UpLoad’ on Amazon Prime is available here.

• Read more about Futurism and Transhumanism here.

• “Will A Transplanted Hand Feel Like His Own? Surgery Raises Questions” (2015, NPR).

In this episode Tyler and Devan discuss plans for distributing the new Covid vaccine and who counts as a “healthcare worker” in phase 1a of the rollout.

Read more here:

• Emergency Use Authorization Explained, FDA

• CDC recommendations

• Which People will get the Covid-19 Vaccine First? NBC News

• Should Doctors get the Vaccine First? Slate

In this episode, Devan and Tyler talk about religion in medicine, including what it’s like to work as a hospital chaplain and the ways patients bring up religion in the hospital. They also talk with professor Patrick Smith about how he came into bioethics from his training in Christian ethics and social justice.

Learn more about Patrick Smith here

Read more about Dr. Smith’s work in social justice here

Download Dr. Smith’s recent work on pandemics below:

Devan & Tyler talk about the ethical issues raised in a new Atlantic Monthly article entitled: “The Last Children of Down Syndrome.” 

Read More about these topics, below:

• “Reproductive Choice and Disability Stigma,” by Devan Stahl (Immanent Frame) 2020.

• “The More You Know: The Ethics of Prenatal Testing,” by Denise Balkissoon (Today’s Parent) 2014.

• “Why Members of the Disability Community Oppose Prenatal Diagnosis and Selective Abortion,” by Marsha Saxton (Prenatal Testing & Disability Rights) 2000.

• “Challenging the Rhetoric of Choice in Prenatal Screening,” by Victoria Seavilleklein (Bioethics) 2008.

• “Keeping the Backdoor to Eugenics Agar?: Disability and the Future of Prenatal Screening,” by Gareth Thomas & Barbara Katz Rothman (AMA Journal of Ethics) 2016.

• US Supreme Court Case: “Buck vs. Bell” (1927).

In this special episode, Tyler and Devan discuss the basics of human subjects research, including the ethical challenges in Covid-19 challenge trials.

Read more here:

• NPR, U.K. Preparing COVID-19 Vaccine Trials That Deliberately Expose Study Subjects
• Science Mag, Controversial ‘human challenge’ trials for COVID-19 vaccines gain support
• Fierce Biotech, U.K. set to infect volunteers with coronavirus in world's first COVID-19 challenge study
• World Health Organization: Key criteria for the ethical acceptability of COVID-19 human challenge studies
• The Scientist, A Challenge Trial for COVID-19 Would Not Be the First of Its Kind

Bioethicists are sometimes difficult to categorize…

Are they Scientists? Are they Philosophers? Are the Clinicians? Are they Social Scientists?

The quick answer, like a lot of other bioethics questions, is that it depends.

In this episode, Tyler and Devan catch up with a real social scientist, Jason Wasserman. They discuss his path into bioethics and how his training as a medical sociologist impacts his teaching and his work with people experiencing homelessness.

Check out more of Jason’s work below:

• “Rasing the Ivory Tower: The Production of Knowledge and Distrust of Medicine Among African Americans” (Journal of Medical Ethics)

• “The Medicalization of Homelessness and the Sociology of the Self: A Grounded Fractal Analysis”

• “Racial Differences in Attitudes towards Euthanasia”