LEGAL DIGS

Two young females, both brain dead without warning, remain on ventilators while their devastated families challenge the judgments of their hospitals.

Autonomy and intervention are two terms of Political philosophy, and they have always been essentially located polar opposites of each other. But in medical practice, it is problematic to stress alone that either side. We should get rid of abstract liberal individual right thinking and reconsider the relationship between the patients and the physicians in all kinds of real situations. Only if we truly worship and praise for the life, including more moral and humanistic concern in abstract right discourse, the more elastic the ethical decision model will be aroused in current medical practice.

Learn how medications can be used to treat substance use disorders, sustain recovery and prevent overdose.

This paper discusses the role of consent in decision making generally and its role in end of life decisions in particular. It outlines a conception of autonomy which explains and justifies the role of consent in decision making and criticises some misapplications of the idea of consent, particular the role of fictitious or “proxy” consents. Where the inevitable outcome of a decision must be that a human individual will die and where that individual is a person who can consent, then that decision is ethical if and only if the individual consents. In very rare and extreme cases such a decision will be ethical in the absence of consent where it would be massively cruel not to end life in order to prevent suffering which is in no other way preventable. Where, however, the human individual is not a person, as is the case with abortion, the death of infants like Mary (one of the conjoined twins in a case discussed in the paper), or in the very rare and extreme cases of those who have ceased to be persons like Tony Bland, such decisions are governed by the ethics of ending the lives of non-persons.

As the US population ages, the current epidemic of overly mechanized deaths threatens to explode into a major public health, and fiscal, crisis.

Most older cancer patients received invasive care in the last month of their lives, a new study finds. That may not be what they wanted.

Publication - Deciding About Health Care: A Guide for Patients and Families

Brain death differs from other states of unconsciousness in important ways.

It’s been five years since my grandmother died, and I still remember how sterile, cold, and distant her hospital room felt, no matter my family’s loving

Basic summaries and coherent overviews of omissions cases in criminal law.

Does the suggestion of withdrawal of life-sustaining technologies reflect moral decay in our culture?

Basic summaries and coherent overviews of omissions cases in criminal law.

The Mental Health Act (MHA) says when you can be detained in hospital and treated against your wishes. You can be detained if professionals think your mental health puts you or others at risk, and you need to be in hospital. This is sometimes called 'being sectioned'

Get free access to the complete judgment in Sultan v REGINA on CaseMine.

This article will consider the legal definition of sexual assault, what must be proven for there to be a conviction, and what you should do if you have been accused of sexual assault.

Basic summaries and coherent overviews of omissions cases in criminal law.

Basic summaries and coherent overviews of omissions cases in criminal law.

Physicians and nurses sometimes exert pressure on the families of critically ill patients to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining therapy from them. This pressure may stem from prognostic, professional, social, and economic factors. Although the pressure ...

Sexual Offences Act 2003