Advisory Committees

STUDY DESIGN: Best evidence synthesis. OBJECTIVE: To provide evidence-based guidance to primary care clinicians about how to best assess and treat patients with neck pain. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: There is a need to translate the results of clinical and epidemiologic studies into meaningful and practical information for clinicians.

STUDY DESIGN: Best evidence synthesis. OBJECTIVE: To provide evidence-based guidance to primary care clinicians about how to best assess and treat patients with neck pain. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: There is a need to translate the results of clinical and epidemiologic studies into meaningful and practical information for clinicians.

Religious discussion of human organs and tissues has concentrated largely on donation for therapeutic purposes. The retrieval and use of human tissue samples in diagnostic, research, and education contexts have, by contrast, received very little direct theological attention. Initially undertaken at the behest of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, this essay seeks to explore the theological and religious questions embedded in nontherapeutic use of human tissue.

This article provides an account of how AndrÈ Hellegers, founder and first Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, laid medicine open to bioethics. Helleger's approach to bioethics, as to morality generally and also to medicine and biomedical science, involved taking the "wider view" -- a value-filled vision that integrated and gave meaning to what otherwise was disparate, precarious, and conflicting.

This article critiques the landmark Report of the Commissioners Charged by the King to Examine Animal Magnetism, now widely known as the "Franklin Report." The authors mount a defense of D'Eslon, the disciple of Mesmer who conducted the "experiments," designed by the Commissioners that debunked animal magnetism as the mechanism responsible for dramatic alterations in behavior and medical cures following the application of Mesmer's procedures.