It takes a village, and guidelines

A week ago I posted on a rather scary case of medical doctors withholding information from a family because they felt that it was in the best interests of the family. I objected mostly because I don't have a good feeling about this sort of paternalism. Laura Hercher has a follow up. She's not offering just her opinion, but she actually made some calls to people who were involved in the case. From what I can gather in her post the issue that triggered this outrage (in my opinion, it's an outrage) is that for these particular tests informed consent was simply not mandatory. Since they didn't have the consent a priori, the doctors had to go with their judgement. The reality here is that there isn't a good solution. That's because we're not talking about science, we're talking about values. The behavior of the medical doctors, withholding information which ...