Marie was 15 when her abdominal pain began. After two years of negative work-ups, countless visits to gastroenterologists, and over 70 days of high school missed, she found herself readmitted to the hospital. “Refractory abdominal pain” was her ostensible diagnosis; “troubled teen” who was “going to be difficult” was embedded in the emergency department’s sign-out. When the medical team arrived to meet Marie, she was huddled in the corner of her hospital bed, silent and withdrawn. Her intern noted the numerous (...) scars cutting across her forearms as she felt for her radial pulses. Marie squirmed in pain when the intern palpated her abdomen.The ED’s work-up had been negative for abdominal pathology. When the... (shrink)

It is widely assumed that disability is typically a bad thing for those who are disabled. Our purpose in this essay is to critique this view and defend a more nuanced picture of the relationship between disability and well-being. We first examine four interpretations of the above view and argue that it is false on each interpretation. We then ask whether disability is thereby a neutral trait. Our view is that most disabilities are neutral in one sense, though we cannot (...) make simple generalizations about disability's relationship to well-being in other important senses. After defending this view, we discuss its practical implications for selective abortion for disability, nondisabled people's interactions with disabled people, and the use of QALYs in health policy. (shrink)

Western thinkers have usually falsified our experience of suffering in trying to make sense of it. In a postmodern age, their accounts seem implausible. We need a way of making sense of suffering while admitting its horror.

Policymakers, employers, insurance companies, researchers, and health care providers have developed an increasing interest in using principles from behavioral economics and psychology to persuade people to change their health-related behaviors, lifestyles, and habits. In this article, we examine how principles from behavioral economics and psychology are being used to nudge people (the public, patients, or health care providers) toward particular decisions or behaviors related to health or health care, and we identify the ethically relevant dimensions that should be considered for (...) the utilization of each principle. (shrink)