UW School of Medicine Bioethics & Humanities Department

The Indigenous Speaker Series provides a platform for dialogues about Indigenous people’s cultural and traditional lived experiences, hosted in partnership by the University of Washington - Tacoma, C.U.R.E (Clean Up the River Environment), Climate Land Leaders, and the Salish Sea Research Center.

Dr. Klitzman will draw on in-depth interview research to examine how, given the political and religious polarization in our nation today, patients and family members from a wide range of backgrounds -- from evangelical to agnostic, atheist and 'nothing in particular' -- seek and find sources of meaning, connection and hope when facing serious medical illness.

Please join us on Wednesday, November 13th at 12pm with Sherronda Jamerson.

Sherronda Jamerson presents how racism, at its most basic level, is a lens though which people interpret, naturalize, and reproduce inequality. She explains that racism is not a “white” issue it is a systematic/structural issue designed to keep in place white cultural dominance. Learn why this system has caused harm to us all.

OBJECTIVES:

1) Maintaining openness and moving forward.

2) Learn how trauma and stress can invade the body and skew perception.  

Please join us on Wednesday, Sept 11th with Dr. Patricia Kuszler.

Her presentation will be about Legal Updates regarding Beginning of Life Issues and a small discussion afterwards.

Patricia C. Kuszler joined the faculty of the School of Law at the University of Washington in 1994 and is a Charles I. Stone Professor of Law.

Learn about what Plymouth Housing is doing to bridge efforts between the housing, healthcare and social services sector to better serve our unhoused community. Learn how structural changes made between these sectors can create greater ethical impact while improving health outcomes, quality of life, and equity.

Objectives:

1. Identify at least 3 major ethical concerns related to integration of health/behavioral health services in PSH.

Please join the Bioethics and Humanities Department on Zoom for a Grand Rounds presentation by Nora Kenworthy, PhD: Crowded Out: The Costs and Consequences of Crowdfunding Healthcare. Dr. Kenworthy will summarize a decade of mixed-methods research on the use of crowdfunding for health care, highlighting core ethical issues with this increasingly popular strategy for helping pay for care.

This presentation is an overview of timeless and emerging topics in reproductive bioethics, with a focus on topics in education and on recent challenges to patient autonomy and practice.

Objectives:

1. Define reproductive bioethics;

2. Describe unique ethical challenges in teaching and practice;

3. Review recent local and national bioethics cases.

About the Speaker:

Medical research for neurological disorders has been limited by the fact that it is ethically difficult to experiment on live people’s brains.  In response, scientists have created small (4mm) pieces of human brains in a dish made from human stem calls to experiment upon called human brain organoids.  With the same motivation, there are now also animals that have had their brains “humanized” in various ways, result

Please join the Bioethics and Humanities department for a Harborview Ethics Forum presentation by Dr. Alexandra Hernandez, MD, MCR on "Trauma Informed Care."