Abstract
The essays in this volume all deal with questions involving conflicts of rights—questions that take on an added importance in health care contexts. A quick scan of media reports and the popular literature soon reveals that health care contexts are fertile ground for generating such conflicts: There is a young boy, “brain dead” and decomposing, whose father (contrary to the advice of all the attending physicians) is attempting to block the removal of the child’s mechanical life-support systems. A nurse is suspended from practice, her license revoked for six months, because she gave a patient more information about alternative therapies than the doctor had authorized. A psychiatric patient, “sane” enough to commit herself for treatment and “sane” enough to consent to electroshock therapy, is judged neither sane enough to refuse to be drugged into tranquility nor sane enough to withdraw from the treatment. Institutionalized “mental patients” who can neither read nor write “consent” to sterilization procedures.
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Bell, N.K. (1982). Introduction. In: Bell, N.K. (eds) Who Decides?. Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5823-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5823-0_1
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