Wesley J. Smith

I have seen a couple of stories lately on a radical new last ditch cancer treatment involving extensive surgery and then a 90 minute bath directly on organs of hot chemotherapy. Significant questions remain about efficacy. A column in the NYT discusses the history of severe cancer treatments in . . . . Continue Reading »

The abortion industry often operates under clinical standards lower than that for outpatient or cosmetic surgical standards. That may soon change in VA and pro choice advocates are screaming. From the Virginia Pilot story:Perhaps most worrisome to clinic operators is a mandate that they must meet . . . . Continue Reading »

Society is oozing “compassion” as a reason to kill these days.  Self starvation is being promoted in the NYT. Assisted suicide is treated by many commentators and advocates as a necessity. And now a mother who killed her healty 8-year-old says she was justified in killing him to . . . . Continue Reading »

This season’s Torchwood, which was once fun science fiction—a spinoff of Dr. Who—has this season, become great science fiction.  Shades of Death Takes a Holiday, the plot line has human death suddenly stopping, beginning with a child sexual predator/killer who survives his . . . . Continue Reading »

I think that prisoners should have a less robust right to refuse medical treatment than the rest of us because they, by definition, have lost their right to personal autonomy.  This isn’t to say it shouldn’t exist, but it is to say that prison officials should have a limited ability . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s a parody.  It must be.  A normal hurricane, not huge as these things go and the first to hit the USA in three years, takes an unusual—but certainly not unprecedented—path up the East Coast’s most populated areas, and the hysterics start screaming about global . . . . Continue Reading »

How refreshing.  The media so often focus on doctor-prescribed death advocates and social outlaws like Kevorkian, that people who do really good, compassionate, and important work with people who are dying rarely receive their due.  That is why I am very happy to see a front page SF . . . . Continue Reading »

Increasingly the medical intelligentsia are pushing a dual mandate on physicians in the name of cutting costs—one to patients and one to society—and when they conflict, many want the individual’s needs to be subsumed to the collective. This attempt to redefine medical . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the most insidious aspects of Obamacare was the creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board to control Medicare costs via virtual bureaucratic fiat, an issue I have inveighed against before.  I enter the fray against the IPAB again in this week’s To The Source.  Here is . . . . Continue Reading »

I was sorry to hear that Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple over health issues.  But ever since his liver transplant in 2009, with reports he had “tumors,” I have had a nagging feeling that he received special treatment because he was Steve  Jobs in the same way that Mickey . . . . Continue Reading »