Search results for ""Author James Lindemann Nelson""

To contain the Minotaur, the ancient artificer Daedalus crafted a maze so intricate that it bewildered even its maker. Contemporary medicine—'Hippocrates' Maze—is every bit as bewildering, so much so that a new and distinct field, bioethics, has been created to help professional caregivers, patients, and families navigate their way through it. In Nelson's typically inviting and graceful style, the essays collected in Hippocrates' Maze explore the labyrinth of contemporary health care, and arrive at some unusual findings about death and decisionmaking, justice and families, cloning and kinship, and organ donation and intimacy. However, the book's most distinctive conclusions concern bioethics itself: the field is not best seen solely as a source of good advice to doctors, but rather as a way of better understanding our humanity.

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To contain the Minotaur, the ancient artificer Daedalus crafted a maze so intricate that it bewildered even its maker. Contemporary medicine—"Hippocrates' Maze—is every bit as bewildering, so much so that a new and distinct field, bioethics, has been created to help professional caregivers, patients, and families navigate their way through it. In Nelson's typically inviting and graceful style, the essays collected in Hippocrates' Maze explore the labyrinth of contemporary health care, and arrive at some unusual findings about death and decisionmaking, justice and families, cloning and kinship, and organ donation and intimacy. However, the book's most distinctive conclusions concern bioethics itself: the field is not best seen solely as a source of good advice to doctors, but rather as a way of better understanding our humanity.

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Mental illness is the poor, and somehow "damaged," cousin to physical ailments in the eyes of too many in our society. Compare the difference in how people would respond to someone who had fallen and broken their leg on the street, to how most react to those mentally ill among us, on those same streets, who spend their winters on steam grates and forage for food in dumpsters. "Rationing Sanity" is a provocative analysis of the mental health care system in the United States, dealing with issues of justice and access to mental health care. How should a decent society, affluent but facing many serious calls on its resources, best care for citizens afflicted with severe and persistent mental illnesses? James Lindemann Nelson brings together, for the first time, scholars of the ethics of mental health care and top managed care policy analysts to address this crucial problem. "Rationing Sanity" integrates those perspectives with the thoughtful practice-based experience of physicians well versed in the actual care of people with emotional and behavioral problems. Over a period of years, the contributors met face-to-face to engage each other on the ethics of managed mental health care - the result is a unique, collaborative effort that provides a wealth of important new insights on not only how Americans can readjust their attitudes toward the mentally ill - but also how we may find more just and humane treatment for those afflicted.

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