.png){kind=icon}
“The Patient, the Physician, and the Truth,” Hastings Center Report May–June (1999): 24–25.
This short case study tells of Patrick, a night guard at the aluminum mill, who resists being given a diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic cancer. Two commentaries (by Simon Whitely and David Spiegel) offer an ethical analysis of Patrick’s apparently voluntary waiver of the requirements of disclosure of medical prognosis.
“Boy Dies of Leukemia after Refusing Treatment for Religious Reasons,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 29, 2007.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/341458_leukemia29.html
This article raises issues of how to evaluate patient competence to make life-ending decisions about refusing health care.
National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), Research Involving Persons with Mental Disorders That May Affect Decisionmaking Capacity, 2 vols. (Rockville, MD: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998).
The Deadly Deception, Denisce DiAnni, PBS/WGBH NOVA, 1993
A documentary series on the Tuskegee syphilis experiment conducted between 1932 and 1972 on poor, rural African American sharecroppers. An example of research without voluntary, informed consent. Also an example of “controlling influence”
Please Let Me Die
http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=10105
Interview with Dax Cowart, who was being kept alive against his wishes after suffering severe and disabling burns in a gas-leak accident. Confronts students with a strong conflict between patient autonomy and beneficence/nonmaleficence (NB: some scenes are graphic)
Fortitude (from Kurt Vonnegut’s In the Monkey House), Season 2, Episode 2 (January, 1993)
An imaginative sci-fi story about a wealthy woman who makes a contract with a physician who promises to keep her “alive.” As he replaces various parts of her body with machines, she faces the possibility of being kept alive forever against her wishes.