Standard of Care

Using courtroom resolutions of real bioethical disputes as its focus, Standard of Care explores the fundamental value conflicts confronting medicine and society today. This case-based approach illuminates the value choices involved in modern medicine. The author urges health care professionals to go beyond the minimalist legal "standard of care" by promoting a vigorous, patient-centred medical ethics based on both respect for the human rights of individual patients and responsibility to society. If modern medicine is to enhance human life, a reconceptualization of law as the beginning of ethical discourse, rather than as an instrument to end it, is essential.
Most of the papers in this book were originally published in the Hastings Center Report and other journals, but they have all been revised and updated for this volume. They are grouped in three broad sections: constitutional issues, private sector bioethics, and public sector bioethics. They deal with reproductive rights, dying and killing, AIDS, biotechnology and commerce, organ transplants and implants, and resource allocation. No other work provides such an incisive and readable survey of the major legal and ethical issues confronting American medicine.