Jason Karlawish
Jason Karlawish is a physician and author. His research examines issues in bioethics. His novel Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont, based on true events along the early 19th century American frontier, is the story of a physician's increasing obsession with achieving fame and fortune. Karlawish is a Professor of Medicine, Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Apr
28
Remarks delivered at the April 24, 2013 conference "Finding Humanity in Advanced Dementia," sponsored by the PNP Program at Washington University in St. Louis
Sunday, April 28, 2013 - 7:52pm
In one of my first substantive memories of a person with advanced dementia, I’m standing at the threshold to the room in the nursing home where my great grandmother lay. I don’t want to say she lived there because in the weeks and months after she fell from the step that led up to the altar at Saint Mary’s Church, they moved her all around, from one to another of all kinds of hospitals and old folks homes and this one, the place I sort of remember as the...
Apr
19
A diary of The Tragic Obsession Tour
Friday, April 19, 2013 - 8:45am
Keeping a diary of the Tour... Reads not like a blog but a book with the oldest entry first (a "golb" perhaps?), so to read the latest diary entry, you'll have to click on "learn more."
October 11th -- Two big New York City events kicked off the tour: the New School's Fiction Forum on October 10th and the New York Academy of Medicine on October 11th.
Vigorous discussions of why write a novel instead of a biography or essay -- because we go to nonfiction for...
Feb
16
Prometheus v. Mayo -- how a supreme court ruling has freed biomarkers of the tyranny of private ownership. Now we await SCOTUS & The Myriad Case....
Saturday, February 16, 2013 - 7:55pm
In recent decades, biomarkers have become essential in diagnosing disease and assessing patients’ responses to therapy. They are the language of desktop medicine. The increasing quantitative rigor and efficiency of these tests have led to the possibility of “personalized medicine.” Despite such progress, the way in...
Feb
15
True or False: The US Constitution includes among our rights, the right to vote. Or, what is the Bauer-Ginsburg Commission going to do about those long lines at the polls?
Friday, February 15, 2013 - 7:41pm
True or False: The US Constitution includes among our rights, the right to vote.
The history of the right to vote in the U.S. is just that -- a history. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has found the right to vote an implicit right in our Constitution, no where in the Constitution can we find a clear and simple statement such as "All citizens of the U.S. age 18 or older have the right to vote." Instead, we have a patchwork of statements that say much about the...
Feb
15
Many thanks to Louise Aronson for “tagging” me in the Next Big Thing blog book tour.
Friday, February 15, 2013 - 9:59am
Louise is the author of the just published story collection, A History of the Present Illness, and she’s also a thoughtful physician who writes on medical education and the role of narrative in medicine. She lives in San Francisco and practices at UCSF and like...
Jan
25
Take the blue pill or red pill? How the electronic medical record could save the clinical trial, cut health care costs, and improve the value of research.
Friday, January 25, 2013 - 10:27am
My colleague James Flory and I just published this essay on Science Progress' blog. It develops the concept of the PORT trial, an idea we published in an article in the American Journal of Public Health.
PORT stands for "Prompted Optional Randomization Trial." What's that? It's a...
Dec
20
Denying older adults their right to vote: the folly of burdensome absentee ballot requirements
Thursday, December 20, 2012 - 12:25pm
This essay is also published in the Raleigh News & Observer. See also Kimberly Leonard's article "Keeping the mentally incompetent from voting" in The Atlantic and this short essay on...
Nov
25
It is possible to both have and not have Alzheimer's disease....
Sunday, November 25, 2012 - 1:02pm
Contradictory as this statement is, a study reported from the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) supports it.
In a paper published in the October issue of the Annals of Neurology [Landau S, Mintun M, Joshi AD, et al. Amyloid deposition, hypometabolism and longitudinal cognitive decline. Annals of Neurology. 2012;72:578-86] investigators reported the results of biomarker studies of 53 patients with dementia caused by Alzheimers...
Nov
02
Denying older adults’ their right to vote: the folly of burdensome absentee ballot requirements
Friday, November 2, 2012 - 12:21pm
Among residents of long term care facilities who want to vote—and studies estimate that on average about one-third and in some facilities as many as three-quarters do vote—nearly all require an absentee ballot, but for residents of in many nursing homes state requirements for what is a valid absentee ballot mean that their vote may not count.
Nursing home residents are typically disabled to the degree they need assistance performing many of life’s basic activities...
Jul
19
Researchers discover uncharted territory in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease
Thursday, July 19, 2012 - 9:12am
The earliest maps of a new land, when viewed beside contemporary maps, often have the look of a child's drawing. The borders are rough, whole regions are missing, others misrepresented. If people followed such a map, they might get terribly lost. And yet, some map is better than none at all.
This week, at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Vancouver, researchers from the Mayo Clinic reported results of their study of potential biomarkers for...
