Health Law and Policy Commons^™

A Little Less Regulation: Why Federal Pain Management Laws Are Hurting State Efforts To Combat The Opioid Epidemic, Michael Waldrop

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unbefriended And Unrepresented: Better Medical Decision Making For Incapacitated Patients Without Healthcare Surrogates, Thaddeus Pope

Faculty Scholarship

How should we make medical decisions for incapacitated patients who have no available legally-authorized surrogate decision maker? Because these patients lack decision making capacity, they cannot authorize treatment themselves. Because they lack a surrogate, nobody else can authorize treatment either. Clinicians and researchers have referred to these individuals as “adult orphans” or as “unbefriended,” “isolated,” or “unrepresented” patients. Clinicians and researchers have also described them as “unimaginably helpless,” “highly vulnerable,” and as the “most vulnerable,” because “no one cares deeply if they live or die.”

The persistent challenges involved in obtaining consent for medical treatment on behalf of these individuals …