1,721,088 research outputs found
The ethical plausibility of the ‘Right To Try’ laws
Get PDFThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.‘Right To Try’ (RTT) laws originated in the USA to allow terminally ill patients to request access to early stage experimental medical products directly from the producer, removing the oversight and approval of the Food and Drug Administration. These laws have received significant media attention and almost equally unanimous criticism by the bioethics, clinical and scientific communities. They touch indeed on complex issues such as the conflict between individual and public interest, and the public understanding of medical research and its regulation. The increased awareness around RTT laws means that healthcare providers directly involved in the management of patients with life-threatening conditions such as cancer, infective, or neurologic conditions will deal more frequently with patients’ requests of access to experimental medical products.
This paper aims to assess the ethical plausibility of the RTT laws, and to suggest some possible ethical tools and considerations to address the main issues they touch.This paper was funded by the European School of Oncology
Supporting Supportive Care in Cancer: The ethical importance of promoting a holistic conception of quality of life
Get PDFThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordAdvances in anticancer therapies and increasing attention towards patient quality of life make Supportive Care in Cancer (SCC) a key aspect of excellence in oncological care. SCC promotes a holistic conception of quality of life encompassing clinical, ethical/existential, and spiritual dimensions. Despite the calls of international oncology societies empirical evidence shows that SCC has not yet been implemented. More efforts are needed given the clinical and ethical value of SCC not only for patients, but also for clinicians and hospitals. Drawing on different literature sources, we identify and discuss three important barriers to the implementation of SCC: 1) organisational – lack of adequate resources and infrastructures in over-stretched clinical environments, 2) professional- burnout of cancer clinicians; and 3) cultural – stigma towards death and dying. We add an ethical counselling framework to the SCC implementation toolkit- which, could offer a flexible and resource-light way of embedding SCC, addressing these barriers
Dealing with death in cancer care: should the oncologist be an amicus mortis?
Get PDFThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recordThe way death is (not) dealt with is one of the main determinants of the current crisis of
cancer care. The tendency to avoid discussions about terminal prognoses and to create
unrealistic expectations of fighting death is seriously harming patients, families, healthcare
professionals, and the delivery of high quality and equitable care. Drawing on different
literature sources, we explore key dimensions of the taboo of death: medical; policy; cultural.
We suggest that the oncologist, from a certain moment, could take on the role of amicus
mortis, a classical figure in the past times, and thus accompanying patients towards the end of
their life through palliation, and linking them to psychosocial, and ethical/existential
resources. This presupposes the implementation of Supportive Care in Cancer, and the ethical
idea of relational autonomy based on understanding patients’ needs considering their sociocultural contexts. It is also key to encourage public conversations beyond the area of
medicine to re-integrate death into life
Pregnancy and lactation. Risk or protective factors for breast cancer?
No full textPregnancy and lactation represent the most effective protective elements against breast cancer; counter-intuitively breast cancer incidence shows a small but noticeable increase up to 5 years after delivery. The cumulative effect is however favourable and women show a reduction in breast cancer risk which is proportional to the total duration of lactation and to the number of full-term pregnancies
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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