people sitting in conference hall.

All-Male Panels, or ‘Manels,’ Must End

By Kelly Wright and Louise P. King

In this day and age, there is no room for all-male panels, or “manels,” as they are commonly known.

Yet, a quick search of Twitter for #manels or #allmalepanel reveals it remains the norm, with picture after picture of them occurring in a wide array of scientific and medical disciplines. Some try to excuse the error with a woman moderator – a “mom-erator” doing the “housekeeping” of managing the presentations. This is just as bad, if not worse.

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Washington DC.,USA, April 26, 1989. Supporters for and against legal abortion face off during a protest outside the United States Supreme Court Building during Webster V Health Services.

Event Video from “Reproductive Rights in 2020”

On July 16, 2020, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted a moderated discussion on recent developments for reproductive rights in the U.S.

2020 has been a notable year for reproductive rights, with the Supreme Court deciding June Medical Services v. Russo, and the COVID-19 pandemic affecting access to abortion, sexual health, and reproductive health services.

Watch panelists Mary Ziegler, Jamille Fields AllsbrookLouise P. King, and Julie Rikelman discuss these developments in a conversation moderated by Emily Bazelon.

Woman surfing.

#MedBikini and Social Media Peer Review

By Louise P. King

Recently, #MedTwitter was awash with pictures of medical professionals in bikinis as a unique and effective protest to a flawed, and now retracted, journal article.

Those posting objected to the methods used and implicit bias contained in a recently published article in the Journal of Vascular Surgery. The authors replicated the methods and conclusions of a prior 2014 study, which did not garner the same attention at the time.

In both studies, various authors from different branches of surgery created fake accounts on social media and then used Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) lists of residents to scrutinize their public profiles for evidence of “unprofessional” conduct. Each of these studies was presented at a national meeting.

But having men create fake accounts to then secretly monitor residents’ social media profiles for what they personally find objectionable is not scientifically rigorous, and itself represents unprofessional behavior.

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A doctor holding a paper that reads "stay at home"

Ethical Duties of Health Care Providers and the Public in the Time of COVID-19

By Jonathan M. Marron, Louise P. King, and Paul C. McLean

In medical ethics, we often speak of duties, such as the duty one has to patients, to society, to our families, to ourselves. In fact, deontology is a moral theory often cited in medical ethics based primarily on the consideration and application of such duties.

But we typically speak of duties under “normal” circumstances, and normal certainly does not describe the current COVID-19 pandemic. It is unclear whether and how our typical conceptualization of duties – the duty of clinicians, of health care institutions, and of the public – apply under these unprecedented conditions. These questions are being considered in our hospitals, living rooms, the lay press, and on social media.

What follows is an edited version of a Twitter dialogue between surgeon Louise P. King and pediatric oncologist Jonathan Marron, both faculty members at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. Drs. King and Marron were responding to a tweet by Paul McLean, social media editor at the Center for Bioethics, on his personal account.

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