Robert Klitzman (born July 1, 1958) is an American psychiatrist and bioethicist.
Robert Klitzman was born on July 1, 1958. He attended Princeton University, where he studied with Clifford Geertz. He then worked for Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who had received the Nobel Prize for work on Kuru, a prion disease. Klitzman then conducted field research on Kuru in Papua New Guinea. [1]
He attended Yale Medical School, and completed his medical internship and psychiatric residency at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic and what is now the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Klitzman is currently a professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. [2] He co-founded and for five years co-directed the Columbia University Center for Bioethics, is the director of the Masters in Bioethics program, [3] and the director of the Ethics and Policy Core of the HIV Center. [4]
He has published nine books and authored or co-authored over 150 academic journal articles and numerous chapters on critical issues in bioethics including: genetics, [5] stem cells, [6] ethics of assisted reproductive technologies, [7] neuroethics, [8] HIV prevention, [9] recreational drug use, [10] research ethics, [11] and doctor-patient relationships. [12]
His research on the experiences of physicians when they become patients shed important light on ways of improving doctor-patient relationships. [13] [14]
He has been widely cited as an authority on ethical issues concerning genetic testing for Huntington's disease, [15] breast cancer, [16] genetic discrimination, [17] medical privacy, [18] epidemics of HIV and prion diseases such as Kuru, [19] and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (or "Mad Cow" disease), [20] death and dying, [21] stem cell research, [22] and spirituality and medicine. [23] [24]
His books include When Doctors Become Patients, [25] A Year-Long Night: Tales of a Medical Internship, In a House of Dreams and Glass: Becoming a Psychiatrist, Being Positive: The Lives of Men and Women With HIV, [26] The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals, and Mad Cow Disease, [27] with Ronald Bayer, Mortal Secrets: Truth and Lies in the Age of AIDS, [28] which was a finalist for a 2004 Lambda Literary Award, [29] Am I My Genes?: Confronting Fate and Other Genetic Journeys, The Ethics Police?: The Struggle to Make Human Research Safe, and Designing Babies: How Technology is Changing the Ways We Create Children. [30] [31] [32]
He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, [33] the Russell Sage Foundation, [34] the Commonwealth Fund, [35] the Aaron Diamond Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, [36] and served on the Department of Defense’s US Army Medical Research and Material Command Research Ethics Advisory Panel. He is a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, [37] a member of the Empire State Stem Cell Commission, [38] HIV Prevention Trials Network, [39] and the Council on Foreign Relations, [40] and is a regular contributor to the New York Times [41] [42] and CNN. [43]
Gene therapy is a medical technology that aims to produce a therapeutic effect through the manipulation of gene expression or through altering the biological properties of living cells.
The American Medical Association (AMA) is a professional association and lobbying group of physicians and medical students. Founded in 1847, it is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Membership was 271,660 in 2022.
Orthomolecular medicine is a form of alternative medicine that aims to maintain human health through nutritional supplementation. The concept builds on the idea of an optimal nutritional environment in the body and suggests that diseases reflect deficiencies in this environment. Treatment for disease, according to this view, involves attempts to correct "imbalances or deficiencies based on individual biochemistry" by use of substances such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids, trace elements and fatty acids. The notions behind orthomolecular medicine are not supported by sound medical evidence, and the therapy is not effective for chronic disease prevention; even the validity of calling the orthomolecular approach a form of medicine has been questioned since the 1970s.
The spread of HIV/AIDS has affected millions of people worldwide; AIDS is considered a pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that in 2016 there were 36.7 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS, with 1.8 million new HIV infections per year and 1 million deaths due to AIDS. Misconceptions about HIV and AIDS arise from several different sources, from simple ignorance and misunderstandings about scientific knowledge regarding HIV infections and the cause of AIDS to misinformation propagated by individuals and groups with ideological stances that deny a causative relationship between HIV infection and the development of AIDS. Below is a list and explanations of some common misconceptions and their rebuttals.
This is a timeline of HIV/AIDS, including cases before 1980.
AIDS is caused by a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which originated in non-human primates in Central and West Africa. While various sub-groups of the virus acquired human infectivity at different times, the present pandemic had its origins in the emergence of one specific strain – HIV-1 subgroup M – in Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo in the 1920s.
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill is a 2002 book by medical journalist Robert Whitaker, in which the author examines and questions the efficacy, safety, and ethics of past and present psychiatric interventions for severe mental illnesses, particularly antipsychotics. The book is organized as a historical timeline of treatment development in the United States.
The index case or patient zero is the first documented patient in a disease epidemic within a population, or the first documented patient included in an epidemiological study. It can also refer to the first case of a condition or syndrome to be described in the medical literature, whether or not the patient is thought to be the first person affected. An index case can achieve the status of a "classic" case study in the literature, as did Phineas Gage, the first known person to exhibit a definitive personality change as a result of a brain injury.
Joseph Adolph Sonnabend was a South African physician, scientist and HIV/AIDS researcher, notable for pioneering community-based research, the propagation of safe sex to prevent infection, and an early multifactorial model of AIDS.
Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD), commonly referred to as "mad cow disease" or "human mad cow disease" to distinguish it from its BSE counterpart, is a fatal type of brain disease within the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy family. Initial symptoms include psychiatric problems, behavioral changes, and painful sensations. In the later stages of the illness, patients may exhibit poor coordination, dementia and involuntary movements. The length of time between exposure and the development of symptoms is unclear, but is believed to be years to decades. Average life expectancy following the onset of symptoms is 13 months.
The Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health is the public health graduate school of Columbia University. Located on the Columbia University Irving Medical Center campus in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, the school is accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health.
Gladstone Institutes is an independent, non-profit biomedical research organization whose focus is to better understand, prevent, treat and cure cardiovascular, viral and neurological conditions such as heart failure, HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer's disease. Its researchers study these diseases using techniques of basic and translational science. Another focus at Gladstone is building on the development of induced pluripotent stem cell technology by one of its investigators, 2012 Nobel Laureate Shinya Yamanaka, to improve drug discovery, personalized medicine and tissue regeneration.
Timothy Ray Brown was an American considered to be the first person cured of HIV/AIDS. Brown was called "The Berlin Patient" at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, where his cure was first announced, in order to preserve his anonymity. He chose to come forward in 2010. "I didn't want to be the only person cured," he said. "I wanted to do what I could to make [a cure] possible. My first step was releasing my name and image to the public."
Itzhak Brook is an adjunct professor of pediatrics and medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington DC. He specializes in infectious diseases. He is a past chairman of the Anti-infective Drug Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and chaired the Committee when AZT was approved for the treatment of HIV/AIDS in 1987.
Linda Jane Laubenstein was an American physician and early HIV/AIDS researcher. She was among the first doctors in the United States to recognize the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s; she co-authored the first article linking AIDS with Kaposi's sarcoma.
HIV/AIDS research includes all medical research that attempts to prevent, treat, or cure HIV/AIDS, as well as fundamental research about the nature of HIV as an infectious agent and AIDS as the disease caused by HIV.
Julio S. G. Montaner, is an Argentine-Canadian physician, professor and researcher. He is the director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, the chair in AIDS Research and head of the Division of AIDS in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and the past-president of the International AIDS Society. He is also the director of the John Ruedy Immunodeficiency Clinic, and the Physician Program Director for HIV/AIDS PHC. He is known for his work on HAART, a role in the discovery of triple therapy as an effective treatment for HIV in the late 1990s, and a role in advocating the "Treatment as Prevention" Strategy in the mid-2000s, led by Myron Cohen of the HPTN 052 trial.
John Gill Bartlett was an American physician and medical researcher, specializing in infectious diseases. He is known as a pioneer in HIV/AIDS research and for his work on vancomycin as a treatment for Clostridioides difficile infection.
James M. Oleske is an American pediatrician and HIV/AIDs researcher who is the emeritus François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Professor of Pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, New Jersey. He is best known for his pioneering work in identifying HIV/AIDS as a pediatric disease, and treating and researching it beginning in the 1980s. He published one of the first articles identifying HIV/AIDS in children in JAMA in 1983 and was a co-author of one of the articles by Robert Gallo and others identifying the virus in Science in 1984.
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