The Roundtable: Our Bodies, Our Medicine
In the United States and beyond, healthcare has become one of the controversial fields of our time. From prohibitive costs to the pitfalls of a profit-driven model, the industry seems less geared to patients’ well-being than ever. Can Web3 address some of today’s pressing issues in medicine? A panel of experts joined Roundtable to talk bioethics and the future of NFTs in healthcare and medicine. In this segment, the panel discusses how corporate interests drive healthcare today, often at the expense of patients’ well-being, and how the current medical paradigm undervalues or ignores hard-won wisdom accumulated through the ages.
Marielle Gross argues that current standards for medical research disregard important forms of knowledge, especially when it comes to women's health.
“Obstetrics is good example," she says. "Midwifery really teaches us that lived experience is where knowledge and evidence is curated. Wisdom is curated in a way that has benefits to people. But if your instrument for measuring comes from a very narrow perspective that considers a randomized controlled trial as the gold standard for evidence, then most of the wisdom that we have will never get incorporated.”
She goes on to note that pharmaceutical companies have demonstrated their interests in putting profits ahead of human lives well-being.
“The opioid crisis is a perfect example of how vested interests can push an entire system through every mechanism, be it ethical, regulatory, legal, economic, in a direction that treated human beings as externalities,” she says.
Watch the full discussion below:
Recommended for You
Roundtable Guests:
Chrissa McFarlane, Founder & CEO, Patientory
Marielle Gross, Bioethics Professor, University of Pittsburgh
Kristin Kostick-Quenet, Professor, Baylor College of Medicine
Jane Thomason, Chairperson, Kasei Holdings
