At the Frontier: The Ethics of Innovative Surgery
Sept 10th webcast is now available online.
Watch panelists Paul Ford, PhD, Darin D. Dougherty, MD, and Elizabeth Hohmann, MD, discuss this topic.
This event is free and open to the public.
You must register to attend and bring proof of ID due to building security.
Modern neuroimaging technology such as functional MRI can now sometimes detect conscious awareness in patients who otherwise appear unconscious. Such a finding may or may not have major implications for how we treat patients with disordered consciousness (e.g. coma, the vegetative state, the minimally conscious state).
How reliable are these technologies? What are the implications of detecting consciousness in someone who looks and acts unconscious? Can and should this information be used to treat patients and manage expectations of caregivers? If so, how? The use of technology to detect consciousness raises a host of questions not only pertinent to medicine and science, but also to law, philosophy, ethics and beyond – questions at the heart of what it means to be conscious, and to recognize consciousness in others.
Panel:
James Bernat, MD, Director of the Program in Clinical Ethics, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Joseph Fins, MD, Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics, Weill Cornell Medical College
Joseph Giacino, PhD, Director of Rehabilitation Neuropsychology, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital
This event will also be broadcast live online at http://bioethics.hms.harvard.edu/news/brain-imaging-disorders-consciousness
Follow the conversation on Twitter using #neuroethx. We'll be answering questions from @HMSbioethics.