Can you honestly think of another issue that people see as a life or death issue but are not informed about?
Yes I can. Doctors almost never discuss issues related to life support should a complication arise during the surgery. The practice in every major hospital in this country is to ignore the issue until it comes up, put the patient on life support, and deal with the moral issues after disaster arises. Patients are completely on their own and completely uninformed as to what the procedure would entail.
And as for obscuring the issue, you can't contemplate every moral or other sort of personal objection a person could have in advance. It's simply not humanly possible. Patient One may not want a particular device used on them because they had a bad experience with the manufacturer before and think the risk is too high. Patient Two may be a Jehovah's Witness and not want blood transfusions (based on a scriptural prohibition). Patient Three might be a female Hasidic Jew and not want male attending nurses or residents. Patient Four might be Catholic and might not want the doctors to revive him if certain complications because the Church decreed that pulling brain dead people off life support is murder. To go through every remotely possible contingency would lengthen consultations needlessly and make the consent forms you sign when undergoing medical treatment into novel-length agreements. The time that this would consume that could be used to treat other patients will cut into what a doctor can do in a given day, and that's going to affect their bottom line.
It just doesn't make sense to put this burden on the doctor when patients can educate themselves just as easily. The patient is in a far better position to make these sorts of moral judgments and ask specific questions relevant to their beliefs rather than making the doctor go through a checklist of every cultural and moral taboo on record.
Notice that, in the issue you give, doctors choose on the side of life without knowing the patients' feelings. The issue here is that the drug is labelled as a particular thing which means something different than most patients think it would mean. The patient, in general, does not realize that they may have a moral objection because of this. How, then, are patients supposed to become aware that a possible moral objection exests?
As for paperwork, patients fill that out in the lobby beforehand. It's already novel-length. The last time I went to a doctor, there were questions on whether I had moral objections to some of the procedures they commonly did. Guess what? It took up one line. I did not feel like that question was equivalent to being buried under paperwork. Granted, I was buried under paperwork, but most of that was medical history. I'm not really happy anyway with doctors who are so concerned with the bottom line that they try to prescribe antibiotics and rush you out the door in two minutes. I'm not happy with doctors who try to prescribe drugs or procedures without explanations. Yet somehow, this has become standard in medical care. What happened to doctors caring about their patients? I can explain what the drug in question does in less than a minute. Why couldn't a pharmacist or doctor have done so? Or at least offered to do so?
Yes I can. Doctors almost never discuss issues related to life support should a complication arise during the surgery. The practice in every major hospital in this country is to ignore the issue until it comes up, put the patient on life support, and deal with the moral issues after disaster arises. Patients are completely on their own and completely uninformed as to what the procedure would entail.
And as for obscuring the issue, you can't contemplate every moral or other sort of personal objection a person could have in advance. It's simply not humanly possible. Patient One may not want a particular device used on them because they had a bad experience with the manufacturer before and think the risk is too high. Patient Two may be a Jehovah's Witness and not want blood transfusions (based on a scriptural prohibition). Patient Three might be a female Hasidic Jew and not want male attending nurses or residents. Patient Four might be Catholic and might not want the doctors to revive him if certain complications because the Church decreed that pulling brain dead people off life support is murder. To go through every remotely possible contingency would lengthen consultations needlessly and make the consent forms you sign when undergoing medical treatment into novel-length agreements. The time that this would consume that could be used to treat other patients will cut into what a doctor can do in a given day, and that's going to affect their bottom line.
It just doesn't make sense to put this burden on the doctor when patients can educate themselves just as easily. The patient is in a far better position to make these sorts of moral judgments and ask specific questions relevant to their beliefs rather than making the doctor go through a checklist of every cultural and moral taboo on record.
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As for paperwork, patients fill that out in the lobby beforehand. It's already novel-length. The last time I went to a doctor, there were questions on whether I had moral objections to some of the procedures they commonly did. Guess what? It took up one line. I did not feel like that question was equivalent to being buried under paperwork. Granted, I was buried under paperwork, but most of that was medical history. I'm not really happy anyway with doctors who are so concerned with the bottom line that they try to prescribe antibiotics and rush you out the door in two minutes. I'm not happy with doctors who try to prescribe drugs or procedures without explanations. Yet somehow, this has become standard in medical care. What happened to doctors caring about their patients? I can explain what the drug in question does in less than a minute. Why couldn't a pharmacist or doctor have done so? Or at least offered to do so?
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