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Experts, Carl E. Schneider
Experts, Carl E. Schneider
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George Bernard Shaw famously said that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. Less famously, less elegantly, but at least as accurately, Andrew Abbott argued that professions are conspiracies against each other. Professions compete for authority to do work and for authority over work. The umpire in these skirmishes and sieges is the government, for the state holds the gift of monopoly and the power to regulate it. In Abbott's terms, "bioethics" is contesting medicine's power to influence the way doctors treat patients. If it follows the classic pattern, bioethics will solicit work and authority by recruiting government's power. A …
Gang Aft Agley, Carl E. Schneider
Gang Aft Agley, Carl E. Schneider
Articles
In my last contribution to this column (HCR, July-August 2000), I argued that the law of bioethics has repeatedly failed to achieve the hopes cherished for it. I presented evidence, for example, that most doctors breach the duty of informed consent, that advance directives do not direct patients' care, and that repeated legal attempts to increase organ donation have failed to find the success predicted for them. I closed that column by promising to try to explain this chastening experience. It would, of course, take a lifetime of columns to capture all the reasons the law of bioethics …