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Financial Burden in Adults With Chronic Illness in Switzerland: A Secondary Analysis of Qualitative Interviews Using Natural Language Processing and Topic Modeling
Abstract Background:Chronic illness may cause a financial burden that affects patients, their caregivers, and families. While international research, mostly from the United States, has largely focused on cancer-related financial hardship, less is known about whether financial distress due to other chronic illnesses exists, specifically in countries that have universal health insurance coverage, such as Switzerland.…
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Responsible Research with Social Media and Health Data @ University of Twente 2026
Social media data offers unprecedented opportunities for understanding human behavior, public discourse, and health-related phenomena, but it also raises complex ethical, legal, and privacy challenges. This lecture explores the distinctive issues involved in working with social media data, including informed consent in public or semi-public spaces, data anonymization and re-identification risks, platform governance, and cross-border…
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The ethical risks of open-access agreements being used for authorship leverage
Transformative agreements — contracts between institutions and publishers that help to fund open-access (OA) systems — are widely presented as tools to advance equity in scientific publishing. But they can introduce an integrity risk: access to publishing could be used as academic leverage. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00776-6
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Why ethics in social listening and infodemic management matters for public health
In a time where mis/disinformation continues to shape public discourse and influence policy decisions, the need for effective and ethical infodemic management has never been more pressing. In this context, and against the backdrop of recent health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the mpox epidemic, along with a rapidly evolving information ecosystem shaped…
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Trump’s statements about acetaminophen and the problem of epistemic corrections
Public reactions to Trump’s claims linking prenatal acetaminophen use to autism highlight the importance of distinguishing between falsehood and the absence of methodological justification. While current evidence does not establish a causal link, responses framed solely in binary true–false terms may overlook how justification works for reaching evidence-based conclusions. We argue that effective correction should…
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Doing research with AI @IBME
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming scientific work, but their integration into research workflows raises profound epistemic, methodological, and ethical questions. This presentation clarifies the distinction between research on AI (examining model behaviour, biases, evaluation reliability, and failure modes) and research with AI, where models function as instruments embedded in data pipelines for coding,…
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Rethinking Resources and Results @ IBME
Over the past 20 years, academia has increasingly been managed through metrics such as funding, staff numbers, publication counts, and citation scores, based on the assumption that more inputs automatically produce more outputs. Using two decades of institutional data from the IBME, this presentation challenges that logic. Through correlations, multiple regressions, and Granger causality analyses,…
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Frames of ethics: a systematic scoping review of graphic novels in ethics education
Graphic novels are increasingly used in ethics education for their ability to convey complex issues through visual storytelling. This scoping review explores how graphic novels, manga, and comics are applied in ethics education, identifying key themes, teaching strategies, pedagogical impact, and research gaps. We followed PRISMA guidelines to review literature from PubMed, Scopus, and Web…
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Perceptions and Misconceptions of PSA Screening in Switzerland: A Preference Epidemiology Study
PSA screening for prostate cancer remains controversial due to the trade-offs between potential benefits and harms, particularly overdiagnosis and overtreatment. This study applies a preference epidemiology approach to explore how individuals evaluate these trade-offs and identify thresholds at which screening is perceived as acceptable or burdensome. We examined both personal and societal perspectives on PSA…
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Research with Health Data: Ethical Issues, Risk Mitigation, and Data Management Practices @ EUTOPIA Health workshop, Ljubljana
Health data offers immense potential for advancing medical research, but it also raises pressing ethical questions. This lecture and the following workshop explore the complex landscape of working with health-related data, from informed consent and data anonymization to governance challenges and cross-border sharing. Participants will gain practical insights into identifying ethical risks, applying mitigation strategies,…
