Clinical treatment decisions
This chapter discusses distinctions between medical treatment and care, benefits to burdens/risks calculus, obligations and options in treatment decisions, life-prolonging treatments, treatments to alleviate suffering, the role of relatives, conflicts of interest between patients, reassessment of treatment decisions, autonomous to non-autonomous conditions, and advance statements and proxy decision makers. Treatment options are selected by carers on the basis of the benefits to burdens/risks calculus. They are then offered to autonomous patients, or considered by carers and relatives on behalf of non-autonomous patients. The tightness or wrongness of life-prolonging and life-sustaining treatments in palliative care depends on the particular clinical circumstances in which they are considered. Carers should not intend to cause overall harm to patients in the interests of relatives, but it is sometimes morally justifiable to compromise the good of one patient in the interests of others.
Keywords: burdens/risks calculus, life-prolonging treatments, alleviating suffering, proxy decision makers, non-autonomous patients
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .