This paper considers whether assisted suicide and euthanasia (AS/E) is an area for medical regulation or whether there is a better alternative regulatory mechanism to govern it. Drawing from empirical evidence across a range of jurisdictions where it is legalized, the paper argues that there are at least four good reasons to consider demedicalizing AS/E: (1) pragmatic ethical issues of infrastructural weakness in AS/E service provision in already overstretched healthcare systems globally; (2) challenges of medicalization; (3) regulatory complexities concerning medical law (including pharmaceutical law) and criminal law; (4) the risk that AS/E becomes more easily susceptible to healthcare economics. The paper suggests several recommendations concerning a possible “demedicalized model.”

Climate change-related environmental harms have been observed to negatively affect mental health. While policymakers and courts around the world widely recognise the impacts of climate change on physical heath as potentially endangering human rights, the implications of climate change for mental health have received significantly less attention. This paper analyzed five cases that challenged national response to climate change and the resulting impacts on mental health before four different international human rights protection bodies. Four out of these five cases were dismissed either because the petitioners did not seek prior action before the national authorities, or because their claims were deemed unsubstantiated. Despite these outcomes, the protection bodies’ treatment of these petitions as well as various other ongoing developments show that the human rights approach to climate change and mental health is gradually emerging at the international and domestic levels, but it is still in its early days and there are various challenges to it.

Ongoing efforts among federal agencies to expunge public health data from websites and other media in line with Trump administration directives on “gender ideology” and other themes has led to widespread confusion, angst, and concern among health officials, medical practitioners, and patients. It has also generated legal claims seeking to reverse and stop public health data purges. Framed within statutory or constitutional limits, legal strategies countering these data policies help assure access to core public health information essential to specific services, care, and outcomes.

The risk of losing access to crucial means-tested programs — like Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — poses a barrier to the enrollment of low-income Americans in clinical trials. This burden likely disproportionately affects members of racial and ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities, elderly individuals, and rural populations, and may frustrate efforts to reflect the US population in clinical trial enrollment. To help achieve representative clinical trials for myriad conditions, Congress should pass legislation excluding payments to clinical trial participants from gross income and expand the clinical trial compensation exclusions for means-tested programs established in the Ensuring Access to Clinical Trials Act of 2015.