Lehman Medical Ethics Lecturer To Discuss “Do Good Facts Make Good Ethics?”
Oct. 5, 2014 – Aviva L. Katz, assistant professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of the ethics consultation service at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, will present the 10th Annual Lehman Medical Ethics Lecture
at Allegheny College at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 8 in Quigley Hall auditorium. The lecture — titled “Do Good Facts Make Good Ethics?” – is free and open to the public.
Katz will discuss the journey that medicine has made in the clinical care of the fetus and neonate with congenital diaphragmatic hernia. She will include brief discussions of the natural history of congenital diaphragmatic hernia, the nature of antenatal counseling and the increasing opportunity to see and diagnose the fetus, the rise of evidence-based medicine and the availability of evidence both in the literature and internally on the ability to provide prognosis based on antenatal imaging.
She will also discuss the ethics of using this data to define the care that medical personnel offer to the neonate, most importantly, declining to offer ECMO support (urgent bedside cardiac bypass for respiratory support) for those with poor prognosis.
Katz’s lecture is made possible through the generous gifts of John W. Lehman, M.D., who graduated from Allegheny College in 1954, and Deborah J. Lehman.
For more information, contact Kirsten Peterson, director of pre-professional studies at Allegheny College, at 814-332-2845 or kpeterso@allegheny.edu.