Patient Refuses Treatment Essay
Patient Refuses Treatment Essay
Patient Refuses Treatment Essay
Scenario: You are a member of your hospital’s medical ethics committee which has been presented with the following issue for consideration and recommendation. A female patient came to the hospital complaining of a recent onset of chronic headaches and impaired vision. Upon radiological testing, it was determined the cause of these problems was a large benign tumor growing on her brain. Based on the type of tumor, there is a high probability that it will continue to grow in size, at the very least causing the patient to go completely and irreversibly blind. All of this is explained to the patient and she is told the only way to fix the problem is to open up her skull and surgically remove it. After going home and doing some research on the Internet, she returns to the hospital to speak with her doctor and advises she is not going to consent to the procedure—instead, she is going to self-treat the condition using the naturopathic and alternative medicine methods she read about on the Internet. The doctors know that if they don’t get the tumor removed soon, the patient’s eyesight is at serious risk (if not worse). The physicians come to the ethics committee for guidance on how to handle this situation.
How aggressive should the doctors be in insisting that the patient accept their recommendation for brain surgery?
What recommendation should the committee ultimately make to the physician and/or the patient?
What should the physicians do to limit legal liability in this situation?
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.