Aaron Rothstein

Caught between the oaths they took as medical students and the demands of corporate healthcare, today’s doctors suffer moral injury.

Human flourishing requires both public health and individual liberty and an appropriate balance between these goods when they conflict. We know that human beings flourish in community; we are social by nature. As such, we should not be surprised that government Covid-19 regulations mandating school closures, lockdowns, masking, and vaccination have isolated us from our fellow citizens and imposed significant attendant harms. It is time to declare this emergency over and once again let people take responsibility for themselves.

On overinterpreting Covid studies for clicks

The American public deserves the truth, even if it is not as favorable or definitive as we would hope. If our policy leaders and scientists cannot put their faith in us with all our faults and shortcomings, why ought we put our faith in them with all their faults and shortcomings?

A doctor spends Passover in East Africa, surrounded by disease and suffering, and reflects on the tenuous balance between order and disorder, exodus and return

The Hippocratic Oath offers physicians of any generation guidelines, proscriptions, and prescriptions about how to be a good physician. We may not agree with all of its conclusions, but if we unthinkingly dismiss them, we do so at our own peril.

The importance of these two discoveries cannot be overstated. Treatments available for seizures, autoimmune diseases, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and more depend on the synapses between neurons; drugs act on receptors and chemicals in this space.

According to the Greeks, philosophy, literature, and history, also known as the humanities, played a role in clarifying those limits. And they forced citizens of Greece to ponder and discuss the question which would bring such clarification: what makes us human?

Bellevue reflects the worst and the best not just of its disadvantaged patients, its physicians, and its students, but of the American democratic project.

More patient autonomy means higher demand for quality health care. More data from scientific studies and further efforts within hospitals to promote quality care means patients and physicians can make the right decisions and expect the right outcomes.

With Rorschach results and interview notes in hand, did Kelley and Gilbert solve the enigma of Nazi pathology, or, at least, provide the materials for such a solution? Or, to put the question even more modestly, what did their investigations teach us about what Dimsdale calls “the anatomy of malice”? 

Advocates for “death with dignity” seem to deny reality, since no human death is truly dignified—even if a person chooses or accepts it. Instead, what ultimately gives death dignity is the kind of life that preceded it.