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March 26, 2005
Doctors and the right to die
The NY Times has an article today regarding the growing frequency of clashes between doctors and patient's families over whether when it is time to say enough, to pull the plug. Huh? When it is time to pull the plug is ultimately a values decision (and be careful: different people have very different norms in this regard). In that sense, who the hell cares what the doctors think? They were once there as basically providers of medical advice (in the same fashion that a lawyer offers advice to clients). This view of doctors as stakeholders is a really dangerous and insidious ones. These are our bodies, our lives, our rights, not theirs! It is time for a real and I would argue healthy shift in our view of doctors, away from this paradigm of stakeholders and toward one more along the lines of the ways we think about lawyers (or even auto mechanics). It is really getting creepy how much of this discussion is starting to focus on their feelings. If we aren't careful, we will not have ultimate sovereignty over our health one day: doctors will.*
It has amazed me, for instance, that so much of the physician assisted suicide discussion has revolved around the implications of this for the physicians' medical ethics. Their ethics are really quite irrelevant here: this is about who has final sovereignty over your body. If you were my doctor and did not want to help me with suicide, fine. But you are fired.
I have more to say in this rant, but for now I need to get back to a lecture on sample selection bias and program evaluation.
*Although I have a certain conflict of interest in saying this (what with the Codeine martini being one of my favorite cocktails, and then the whole Hunter Thompson thing), I think the first step is to basically get rid of their exclusive prescription powers. First, people in poorer countries manage to do quite well without the "protection" of prescriptions (or at least, where they do fail to do well it is hard to argue that this is the reason). Second, from what I have read doctors make so many prescription mistakes that I can't see how things would get allot worse if we greatly expanded the set of non-prescription drugs.
Posted by dag at March 26, 2005 07:57 PM