Can Doctors Maintain Good Character? An Examination of Physician Lives

Can doctors maintain good character? This paper shifts the focus from patient care to ethical considerations that bear on the physician and impact her as a person. By decentering patient care, the paper highlights certain factors that habituate a particular way of reasoning that is not conducive to inculcating good character. Such factors include, standards of professionalism, being influenced by external monitors, and emphasis on adherence to guidelines. While such factors may benefit patients, they often adversely affect the character of physicians

Presence of Mind: A Political Posture

The political posture often encouraged in liberatory movements is that of urgency. Urgency is based on the idea that if oppressed peoples do not act “now,” then their fate is forever sealed as subordinates within social and political power hierarchies. This paper focuses on a contrasting political posture, termed presence of mind, motivated by the current political atmosphere of distrust and disenfranchisement in which some Muslim-Americans find themselves. Presence of mind is defined as the ability to critically unpack visceral affective responses to injustice—giving special consideration to power structures, one’s social location, and relationships—and then to asses an appropriate response in virtue of that consideration that best upholds our commitments. This paper argues that cultivating presence of mind acknowledges the complexities of the Muslim-Americans’ identity while providing a posture that allows the resistor to best represent their political commitments

Physician Ethics: How Billing Relates to Patient Care

Medical billing has become so intertwined with patient care, that in order to be truly committed to the physician's telos of managing a patient's medical suffering, it is imperative that physician ought to reexamine many of the ethical considerations about billing

I Know What Happened to Me: The Epistemic Harms of Microaggression

How do we know that what has happened to us is a microaggression? I claim in this chapter that our understanding about how we perceive microaggression is grounded in the cultivation and critical reflection about experiences of people who occupy marginalized social locations. My aim is to explore the nature of epistemic harms of microaggression in order to highlight how they diminish the microaggressed’s ability to generate and participate in making knowledge claims. I differentiate between the primary (direct) harm of microaggressive acts, and the secondary epistemic harms that occur in the aftermath of the microaggression, particularly when the microaggressed attempts to convey their experience to others. I conclude with an analysis of the two secondary harms in hopes that it helps us explore a possible avenue of resistance to the epistemic harms of microaggression

Knowledge Management Application in the Service Industry

Knowledge management is now considered as one of the pressing challenges in economic development related to the world of industry, studies in services and information. The adoption and implementation of knowledge management may be considered as a breakthrough factor for companies willing to integrate it in the knowledge-based economy. In service industry, knowledge management enables organizations to make in more intelligent decisions as they render services to the public. Nowadays, the foundation of new economics has shifted from natural resources to intellectual assets and top manager in service industry might be forced to focus on knowledge management which have been acknowledged as the most important resources and capability of modern firms’ achievement. Companies within this industry perform tasks that are useful to their customers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the application of information and knowledge management in the service industry. The paper discusses the concept of knowledge management as regards to service industry as well as service industry, which involves the provision of services to businesses as well as final consumers. There are three (3) main areas of knowledge management which are discussed in this paper, and they are – accumulating knowledge, storing knowledge and sharing knowledge. Importance, advantages and disadvantages of knowledge management in service industry is equally discussed, including knowledge management best practices in service industry. The paper concludes that in applying knowledge management in service industry, the key is making sure that people, particularly in top management, understand the advantages of knowledge management and what makes it usefu

Anti-MRSA potential and metabolic fingerprinting of actinobacteria from Cholistan desert, Pakistan

Purpose: To investigate the actinomycetes from an extreme environment for their inhibitory potential against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and the metabolic fingerprinting of the active strains.Methods: A total of 80 actinomycetes strains were recovered from Cholistan desert, Pakistan. The isolated strains were identified by morphological, biochemical and physiological characterization and by 16S rRNA gene sequencing. The antimicrobial activity of the selected actinomycetes strains against MRSA was determined by agar well and disc diffusion assays. All the strains were screened against MRSA for the identification of potent antimicrobial producers. Further, validation of MRSA, strains was carried out using a portion of mec-A gene (533bp) of five strains including A1, A6, A7, A8 and A9, amplified and sequenced.Results: The desert actinomycetes strains exhibited promising antimicrobial activity against MRSA with zone of inhibition of up to 25 mm recorded in agar diffusion and disc diffusion assays. The MRSA strains also showed maximum genetic similarity with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in GenBank. Most of the actinobacterial strains exhibited 99 % genetic similarity with the genus Streptomyces, including strains AFD6, AFD12, AFD23, AFD25, and AFD26 while isolate AFD18 has 100 % similarity with a Pseudonocardia, named Saccharothrix xinjiangensis.Conclusion: The results reveal that actinomycetes from the desert ecosystem studied are significant producers of useful antimicrobial agents, and should be explored further for novel drug candidates against MRSA.Keywords: Anti-MRSA potential, Actinomycetes, Extreme environments, Metabolic fingerprinting, 16S rRNA gene sequencing, Mec-A gene characterizatio

An Examination of the Ethics of Submissiveness

This paper examines the trait of submissiveness within the framework of virtue ethics. Submissiveness is generally regarded as a vice, particularly when evaluated in reference to patriarchal systems. This paper argues that there is something valuable about the trait of submissiveness—when it functions as a virtue—that is lacking in secular contexts, and this lack detracts from the possibilities of a good life