Fatness, Health, & Uncertainty

By Daniel Goldberg

Reading Nir’s thought-provoking post below sparked a couple of thoughts in my mind regarding fatness, ethics, and population health.  The first is what I take to be the professional obligation to engage seriously with the epidemiologic uncertainty regarding the connections between fatness and health.  With notable exceptions — see the Rudd Center, for example — most of the work in bioethics and law that discusses obesity problems does so by averring (1) that obesity is an enormous problem for public health; and then (2) proceeding to discuss a particular intervention intended to ameliorate it.  But I generally perceive all too much haste with the first step. Read More

Introducing Daniel Goldberg

We’re excited to introduce and welcome Daniel Goldberg to our blogging community as an occasional contributor.

Daniel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioethics & Interdisciplinary Studies, The Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University.  He is an attorney, historian, and public health ethicist.  Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, he holds a B.A. with honors in philosophy from Wesleyan University, and received his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Houston Law Center in 2002.  He clerked for a state supreme court justice and practiced pharmaceutical, hospital, and insurance litigation for several years before earning his Ph.D. with distinction in the medical humanities from the Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch in 2009.

In applied ethics, Daniel focuses on public health ethics and population-level bioethics.  In history, he is an intellectual historian focusing primarily on the history of pain without lesion and on the history of medical imaging, especially X-rays.

For more about Daniel and his work, click here.