A Casebook of Medical Ethics

1: Paternalism in the Therapeutic Relationship 1.1: Ambivalence Toward Electroconvulsive Therapy 1.2: Treatment Refusal in the Medical Intensive Care Unit 1.3: An Uncooperative Leukemia Patient 1.4: Rehabilitation of a Dependent Patient 1.5: Alternative Approaches to Informed Consent 1.6: Previous Refusal of Treatment by a Presently Comatose Patient 1.7: A Family's Refusal of Blood Transfusions for a Mother and Her Son 1.8: Deciding Whether to Discharge a Suicidal Patient 1.9: A Request for Sex-Reassigning Surgery 1.10: Divulging Information Concerning an Infant's Condition 2: Duties to Patient and Family 2.1: A Daughter's Insistence on Aggressive Treatment 2.2: Parental Refusal of Cancer Treatment on Religious Grounds 2.3: Informed Consent and the Dying Adolescent 2.4: Treatment Refusal for an Infant with Possible Brain Damage 2.5: Venereal Disease and Adolescent Confidentiality 2.6: Contraceptives for an Adolescent 2.7: Request for Abortion for a Retarded Daughter 2.8: Request for Hysterectomy for a Retarded Eleven-Year-Old 2.9: Conflict About Maintaining a Brain-Dead Woman for the Sake of Her Fetus 2.10: Choosing the Method of Delivery for a Fetus with Hydrocephalus 3: Deciding for Others 3.1: A Bedridden and Cognitively Impaired Elderly Patient 3.2: Who Should Decide for a Patient in Persistent Vegetative State? 3.3: Nasogastric Tube Feedings for an Elderly Stroke Patient 3.4: A Prolonged Stay in the Neonatal ICU 3.5: Deciding Treatment When the Preliminary Diagnosis is Trisomy 18 3.6: Risk/Benefit Assessment of Surgery for a Child Suffering from Strokes 3.7: Responding to a Family's Decision for Laetrile 3.8: Selecting Therapy for a Mentally Retarded Teenager 3.9: Birth Control for a Retarded Woman 3.10: A Family's Lack of Commitment 4: Medical Research Involving Human Subjects 4.1: Limited Consent in Alcoholism Research 4.2: Disclosure of Preliminary Results in a Randomized Clinical Trial 4.3: Constraints on Consent in a Phase I Clinical Trial 4.4: Proxy Consent for Incompetent Trauma Patients 4.5: Undue Inducement in the Recruitment of Research Subjects 4.6: Nontherapeutic Research Procedures Involving Children 4.7: Discomfort from Repeated Nontherapeutic Research Procedures Involving Competent Adults 4.8: Physicians' Treatment Preferences and Recruitment of Subjects for a Randomized Clinical Trial 4.9: Parental Preferences and a Child's Involvement in a Randomized Clinical Trial 4.10: Compensating Research Injuries 5: Physicians, Third Parties, and Society 5.1: Request for Surgery the Physician Considers Unnecessary 5.2: Providing Free Care 5.3: Risk of Litigation as a Factor in Decision Making 5.4: Pressures to Provide Customary Care 5.5: Confidentiality and Child Abuse 5.6: Rejection of a Consultant's Advice 5.7: Abortion Resulting in a Live Birth 5.8: Costly Nutrition for a Terminal Patient 5.9: Cost Factors in the Choice of Treatment for Kidney Stone Disease 5.10: Artificial Insemination for a Single Woman Topical Index to Cases