Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and flourish? Yet is it not also harmful to let rising costs strangle our health care system, eventually harming everyone? In Taming the Beloved Beast, esteemed medical ethicist Daniel Callahan confronts this dilemma head-on. He argues that we can't escape it by organizational changes alone. Nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our thinking about health care is needed to achieve lasting and economically sustainable reform. The technology bubble, he contends, is beginning to burst. Callahan weighs the ethical arguments for and against limiting the use of medical technologies, and he argues that reining in health care costs requires us to change entrenched values about progress and technological innovation. Taming the Beloved Beast shows that the cost crisis is as great as that of the uninsured. Only a government-regulated universal health care system can offer the hope of managing technology and making it affordable for all.

Product Description: Much has been written about medicine and the market in recent years. This book is the first to include an assessment of market influence in both developed and developing countries, and among the very few that have tried to evaluate the actual health and economic impact of market theory and practices in a wide range of national settings...read more

Product Description: The idea that we have an unlimited moral imperative to pursue medical research is deeply rooted in American society and medicine. In this provocative work, Daniel Callahan exposes the ways in which such a seemingly high and humane ideal can be corrupted and distorted into a harmful practice...read more

Product Description: At the center of the debate over complementary and alternative medicine -- from acupuncture and chiropractic treatments to homeopathy and nutritional supplements -- is how to scientifically measure the effectiveness of a particular treatment...read more

Product Description: The government, the media, HMOs, and individual Americans have all embraced programs to promote disease prevention. Yet obesity is up, excersize is down, teenagers continue to smoke, and sexually transmitted disease is rampant. Why? These intriguing essays examine the ethical an social problems that create subtle obstacles to changing American's unhealthy behavior...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Debates over health care have focused for so long on economics that the proper goals for medicine seem to be taken for granted; yet problems in health care stem as much from a lack of agreement about the goals and priorities of medicine as from the way systems function...read more

Product Description: Drawing on his own experience, and on literature, philosophy, and medicine, Daniel Callahan offers great insight into how to deal with the rewards of modern medicine without upsetting our perception of death. He examines how we view death and the care of the critically ill or dying, and he suggests ways of understanding death that can lead to a peaceful acceptance...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this collection of eight provocative essays, the author sets forth his views on the need to replace patient-centered bioethics with family-centered bioethics. Starting with a critique of the awkward language with which philosphers argue the ethics of personal relationships, the book goes on to present a general statement on the necessity of family-centered bioethics...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Amazon.com Review: For most of human history, infectious diseases have claimed more lives than other classes of disease. Now chronic diseases--heart disease, cancer, stroke, and diabetes--are most prevalent, even in the developing world. Many of these conditions result from lifestyle choices; smoking alone is thought to cause about one fourth of all deaths in the United States...read more

Product Description: This study from the Hastings Center series asks basic questions about the purposes and ends of medicine and shows that the answers have deep practical implications. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A leading expert on medical ethics argues that the cause of America's health-care crisis is not inefficient organization and waste, but rather society's and the medical community's relentless quest to extend life and find a cure for every disease. 20,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: For much of the developed world, health care for a surging elderly population looms as one of the most daunting problems of the coming decade. In this book, contributors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and countries discuss resource allocation for the elderly and debate plans for the years ahead...read more

Product Description: Regardless of the fate of national health care reform, public policy makers will have to make difficult and tragic choices about which health services are more or less important. This volume, the first comprehensive examination of setting mental health services priorities, systematically explores the history, ethics, and politics of setting priorities for public mental health services...read more

Product Description: A provocative call to rethink America's values in health care.

Product Description: A provocative call to rethink America's values in health care. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The author of What Kind of Life examines the subjects of medical ethics and mortality and encourages a better understanding of the place of death in nature and its meaning to humans.

Examines the problems of providing and paying for health care for the increasing number of elderly Americans and offers controversial solutions to these problems

Product Description: Originally published in 1973 by Macmillan, this probing book examines the uses, control and consequences of technology in a world which must either take realistic stock of its obsession with unbridled progress and individual freedom or perish in its excesses...read more