Golden opportunity, reasonable risk and personal responsibility for health

Opportunity and Responsibility

A s sports medicine clinicians, we spend a lot of time around athletes during their daily routines. These daily encounters by athletic trainers, physical therapists, and physicians in the training room and on the field often provide us with an opportunity to improve the experience of athletes entrusted to our care. Along with this opportunity, more importantly, comes the responsibility to inter...

Denial of Treatment to Obese Patients—the Wrong Policy on Personal Responsibility for Health

In many countries around the world, including Iran, obesity is reaching epidemic proportions. Doctors have recently taken, or expressed support for, an extreme ‘personal responsibility for health’ policy against obesity: refusing services to obese patients. This policy may initially seem to improve patients’ incentives to fight obesity. But turning access to medical services into a benefit depe...

Personal responsibility in oral health: ethical considerations.

Personal responsibility is a powerful idea supported by many values central to West European thought. On the conceptual level personal responsibility is a complex notion. It is important to separate the concept of being responsible for a given state of affairs from the concept of holding people responsible by introducing measures that decrease their share of available resources. Introducing per...

A golden opportunity, squandered.

Even when used to make products of negligible risk and that contribute significantly to public health, recombinant DNA technology (a.k.a. ‘genetic modification’, or GM) applied to agriculture has a tough row to hoe. ‘Golden Rice’, which has been enriched by the addition of genes that allow rice to synthesize b-carotene (the precursor of vitamin A) in its edible endosperm, has endured resistance...

A Golden Opportunity.