Back to the future? Identifying an appropriate legal approach to judging disclosure of alternative medical treatments
Rob Heywood & José Miola
What the paper says
<p dir="ltr">Medical law has always been about the conflict between healthcare professionals and patients. The tension arose as the early pioneers of the subject noted that doctors appeared to be treated differently to other professionals in negligence cases,Footnote1 that they were making protected decisions in relation to ethical issues beyond the boundaries of their clinical expertise,Footnote2 and that this was anathema to the concept of patient autonomy.Footnote3 As the subject developed, the sense was that the ‘pro-patient’ argument was increasingly in the ascendant and reached its apotheosis in the Supreme Court’s decision in Montgomery,Footnote4 which openly privileged and prioritised patient autonomy in relation to risk disclosure.Footnote5 The amount of information that patients had to be provided with would be determined through the lens of what patients were entitled to, rather than the duties of healthcare professionals.Footnote6 However, one underdeveloped part of Montgomery, and the law in general, lay in the issue of provision of information about alternative treatments.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.