This book analyzes policy fights about what counts as good evidence of safety and effectiveness when it comes to new health care technologies in the United States and what political decisions mean for patients and doctors. Medical technologies often promise to extend and improve quality of life but come with many questions: Are they safe and effective? Are they worth the cost? When should they be allowed on the market, and when should Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance companies be required to pay for drugs, devices, and diagnostic tests? Using case studies of disputes about the value of mammography screening; genetic testing for disease risk; brain imaging technologies to detect biomarkers associated with Alzheimer's disease; cell-based therapies; and new, expensive drugs, Maschke and Gusmano illustrate how scientific disagreements about what counts as good evidence of safety and effectiveness are often swept up in partisan fights over health care reform and battles among insurance and health care companies, physicians, and patient advocates. Debating Modern Medical Technologies: The Politics of Safety, Effectiveness, and Patient Access reveals stakeholders' differing values and interests regarding patient choice, physician autonomy, risk assessment, government intervention in medicine and technology assessment, and scientific innovation as a driver of national and global economies. It will help readers to understand the nature and complexity of past and current policy disagreements and their effects on patients.

This book studies the critical issues that dominate contemporary discourse on biomedical ethics. It brings together various debates highlighting the historical, philosophical, scientific and technological perspectives involved in modern medicine in different societies, with a focus on contemporary medicine in India. The volume provides a comprehensive look into the origin and evolution of bioethics with an examination of how complex bioethical issues are negotiated in different contexts. The author traces the transition from traditional to modern bioethics and examines important bioethical frameworks to deal with moral dilemmas and challenges. He also contemplates the future of bioethics with an emphasis on regulation in practice to prevent repression and exploitation in medicine. A comprehensive study of contemporary approaches to bioethics, the book will be indispensable for students, professionals and researchers in public health, ethics, biomedical ethics, medicine, philosophy, sociology, public policy and anthropology.

This comprehensive anthology represents the key issues and problems in the field of medical ethics through the most up-to-date readings and case studies available. Each of the book's six parts is prefaced with helpful introductions that raise important questions and skillfully contextualize the positions and main points of the articles that follow.