On the Anatomy of Health-related Actions for Which People Could Reasonably be Held Responsible: A Framework.

Should we let personal responsibility for health-related behavior influence the allocation of healthcare resources? In this paper, we clarify what it means to be responsible for an action. We rely on a crucial conceptual distinction between being responsible and holding someone responsible, and show that even though we might be considered responsible and blameworthy for our health-related actions, there could still be well-justified reasons for not considering it reasonable to hold us responsible by giving us lower priority. We transform these philosophical considerations into analytical use first by assessing the general features of health-related actions and the corresponding healthcare needs.

Responsibility Considerations and the Design of Health Care Policies: A Survey Study of the Norwegian Population.

The objective of this article is to explore people's attitudes toward responsibility in the allocation of public health care resources. Special attention is paid to conceptualizations of responsibility involving blame and sanctions. A representative sample of the Norwegian population was asked about various responsibility mechanisms that have been proposed in the theoretical literature on health care and personal responsibility, from denial of treatment to a tax on unhealthy consumer goods.

Could information about herd immunity help us achieve herd immunity? Evidence from a population representative survey experiment.

Aims: Immunisation causes dramatic reductions in morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases; however, resistance to vaccination is nonetheless widespread. An understudied issue - explored here - is whether appeals to collective as opposed to individual benefits of vaccination encourage people to vaccinate. Knowledge of this is important not least with respect to the design of public health campaigns, which often lack information about the collective benefits of vaccination.

Phase-dependent justification: the role of personal responsibility in fair healthcare.

The main aim of this paper is to examine the fairness of different ways of holding people responsible for healthcare-related choices. Our focus is on conceptualisations of responsibility that involve blame and sanctions, and our analytical approach is to provide a systematic discussion based on interrelated and successive health-related, lifestyle choices of an individual. We assess the already established risk-sharing, backward-looking and forward-looking views on responsibility according to a variety of standard objections.

Naloxone-induced reduction of schizophrenic symptoms.

A schizophrenic patient was repeatedly treated with intravenous naloxone 0.04 mg or saline in a double-blind design. The Comprehensive Psychopathological Rating Scale was used to quantify the symptoms before and after each injection.

The adhesiveness of blood platelets before, during and after cardiopulmonary bypass.

The influence of cardiopulmonary bypass on the adhesiveness of blood platelets, using both bubble (Bentley and Rygg-Kyvsgaard) and membrane (Landé-Edwards) oxygenators, was investigated. With both types of oxygenators, there was a considerable fall in platelet adhesiveness during cardiopulmonary bypass, particularly with the Rygg-Kyvsgaard apparatus. The adhesiveness increased 30 minutes after bypass, but it was still not restored to the initial value.

Intra-aortic balloon pumping in the treatment of cardiogenic shock following open-heart surgery.

Intra-aortic balloon pumping (IABP) was used in the treatment of 29 patients in cardiogenic shock refractory to pressor drugs subsequent to open-heart surgery. Nineteen patients recovered from the shock primarily, but four died later in hospital. The remaining 15 were discharged alive.