This article highlights a recent report published by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, entitled, “Protecting and Promoting the Health of NFL Players: Legal and Ethical Analysis and Recommendations”. 

By Rick Maese | The Washington Post | November 17, 2016

A new report from Harvard University proposes drastic changes in the way health care is administered in the NFL, urging the nation’s most popular sports league to upend its system of medicine and untangle the loyalties of the doctors and trainers charged with treating players.

Asserting that the long-standing current structure has inherent conflicts of interest, the 493-page report outlines a new system in which a team’s medical staff is devoted solely to players’ interests and no longer reports to team management or coaches.

“The intersection of club doctors’ dual obligations creates significant legal and ethical quandaries that can threaten player health,” the report states. Continue reading »

Society has long fantasized about a day when science would provide technological cures for societal ills such as aggression, impulsive decision-making, and depression. In the popular science fiction TV Show, Star Trek, a medical tricorder was waved over the body, magically probing internal systems and recalibrating problems without any side effects. For some medical illnesses, such a device seems just around the corner (See Qualcomm’s $10 Million Tricorder XPrize; Scanadu Scout). However, for mental illnesses, which are particularly complex and poorly understood, such a solution remains elusive. Nevertheless, several prominent media outlets have drawn attention to the use of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a technique which delivers a low-intensity direct current to modulate the activity of neurons in the cerebral cortex, as an early example of such a fabled device.

Indeed, by utilizing tDCS, researchers at academic medical centers have made widespread reports of its therapeutic effects on a number of neuropsychiatric disorders ranging from major depressive disorder, pain disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, drug addiction, Parkinson’s disease and motor deficits after stroke. Moreover, outside a disease population, researchers have also found that a normal population is capable of benefitting from tDCS – showing increased performance across a variety of cognitive tasks such as attention, memory and decision-making.
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