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Article: Justified limits on refusing intervention. (treatment of patients by physicians)
- Article from:
- The Hastings Center Report
- Article date:
- March 1, 1991
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1991 Hastings Center. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Justified Limits on Refusing Intervention
Respect for the autonomy of the patient is a dominant ethical principle in the literature on biomedical ethics, particularly in the literature on refusal of medical intervention by competent or apparently competent patients. There seems to be a near uniform consensus that refusal of surgical management of a gangrenous toe, religiously based refusal of blood products to manage shock, and refusal of cesarean delivery to manage complete placenta previa should always be respected. This consensus rests on the underlying view that refusal of medical intervention is simply an instance of the general negative right to be left ...