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Full-Text Articles in Law
When Desperate Patients Go To Court For Unproven Treatments - The Battle For Hospital Independence, Christopher Robertson, Margaret Houtz
When Desperate Patients Go To Court For Unproven Treatments - The Battle For Hospital Independence, Christopher Robertson, Margaret Houtz
Faculty Scholarship
As the Covid-19 pandemic wears on, patients have asked courts to compel hospitals to administer unproven therapies, with mixed legal results. Although talk radio hosts, politicians, and social media users have promoted various treatment approaches, they have given particular attention to ivermectin. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved ivermectin for use in humans for treating onchocerciasis (river blindness), intestinal strongyloidiasis, certain other parasitic worms, head lice, and skin conditions such as rosacea. Although this approval facilitates legal offlabel use for prophylaxis against or treatment of other conditions, both the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention …
With Child, Without Rights?: Restoring A Pregnant Woman's Right To Refuse Medical Treatment Through The Hiv Lens, Michael Ulrich
With Child, Without Rights?: Restoring A Pregnant Woman's Right To Refuse Medical Treatment Through The Hiv Lens, Michael Ulrich
Faculty Scholarship
In Doe v. Division of Youth & Family Services , a hospital employee sought state intervention when an HIV-positive woman refused to comply with treatment recommendations during her pregnancy to drastically reduce the chances of mother-to-child-transmission (MTCT), eventually triggering a lawsuit against the hospital. With an increase in the number of HIV-positive women becoming pregnant and the court avoiding constitutional analysis of the woman’s right to refuse medical treatment, there is a clear void where legal analysis is surely needed. This Article fills this void for the inevitable case where an HIV-positive pregnant woman’s right to refuse medical treatment is …
Pandemic Preparedness: A Return To The Rule Of Law, Wendy K. Mariner, George J. Annas, Wendy E. Parmet
Pandemic Preparedness: A Return To The Rule Of Law, Wendy K. Mariner, George J. Annas, Wendy E. Parmet
Faculty Scholarship
Current discussions of pandemic influenza and emergency preparedness would do well to heed the lessons of US Airways flight 1549, which landed in the Hudson River in January 2009. This article examines what past emergencies teach us about how to prevent or control epidemics and argues that it is time for a return to the rule of law in pandemic preparedness. The most important resource in emergency preparedness is a healthy, resilient population, which depends importantly on sustainable systems of medical care and public health. Preparedness thus requires more money than law. After September 11, 2001, however, federal emergency preparedness …
Extremely Preterm Birth And Parental Authority To Refuse Treatment: The Case Of Sidney Miller, George J. Annas
Extremely Preterm Birth And Parental Authority To Refuse Treatment: The Case Of Sidney Miller, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
Disputes between physicians and patients over medical care have tended toward resolution in both the courts and ethics committees, with each of these bodies ultimately deciding that the informed, competent patient must be the final decision maker. Parents, too, have the authority to make medical decisions for their children, but these decisions can be challenged if physicians do not believe they are medically reasonable. One bioethical issue, however, is as intractable today as it was 30 years ago, when it began to be publicly discussed: the extent of parental authority to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment for an extremely premature infant. …
The Right To Health And The Nevirapine Case In South Africa, George J. Annas
The Right To Health And The Nevirapine Case In South Africa, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
Thanks to activists in South Africa, the right to health as a human right has returned to the international stage, just as it was being displaced by economists who see health through the prism of a globalized economy and by politicians who see it as an issue of national security or charity. The current post-apartheid debate in South Africa is not about race but about health, and in this context, the court victory by AIDS activists in the nevirapine case has been termed not only, as stated in one British newspaper, “the greatest defeat for [President Thabo] Mbeki's government” but …
The Last Resort: The Use Of Physical Restraints In Medical Emergencies, George J. Annas
The Last Resort: The Use Of Physical Restraints In Medical Emergencies, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
Public awareness of the use of restraints in medicine has been greatly heightened by a five-part investigative series on physical restraints in psychiatric hospitals by the Hartford Courant and reaction to it by Connecticut's U.S. senators, Joseph Lieberman and Christopher Dodd. In October 1998 the Courant 's 50-state survey identified 142 patients who had died while in restraints or seclusion in the past decade, and the total number is probably much higher. The newspaper advocated the need for national standards for the use of restraints, impartial oversight, and accountability “for behavior that is cruel and even criminal.” The use of …
A National Bill Of Patients' Rights, George J. Annas
A National Bill Of Patients' Rights, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
In one of the most enthusiastically received proposals in his January State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton called on Congress to enact a national bill of rights in health care. The President said, “You have the right to know all your medical options, not just the cheapest. You have the right to choose the doctor you want for the care you need. You have the right to emergency room care, wherever and whenever you need it. You have the right to keep your medical records confidential.”
Informed Consent, Cancer, And Truth In Prognosis, George J. Annas
Informed Consent, Cancer, And Truth In Prognosis, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
Barbara Tuchman records that during the Black Death epidemic in the early 14th century, “doctors were admired, lawyers universally hated and mistrusted”. The great plagues and wars of the Middle Ages produced a “cult of death,” including a vast popular literature that had death as its theme. As the 20th century closes, our emphasis is on the denial of death, and the honest discussion of death remains rare both in popular literature and in conversations between physicians and patients. This is one reason why Shana Alexander shocked a national conference of bioethicists last year by saying, “I trust my lawyer …
Control Of Tuberculosis -- The Law And The Public's Health, George J. Annas
Control Of Tuberculosis -- The Law And The Public's Health, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
In their history of tuberculosis, The White Plague, Rene and Jean Dubos note that the first national movement to control tuberculosis in the United States came from the Medico-Legal Society of the City of New York, a group of lawyers, scientists, and physicians devoted to solving social problems. At a meeting in 1900 to organize an American Congress on Tuberculosis, the group drafted legislation designed to prevent the spread of the disease. Even though almost every state eventually passed tuberculosis-control laws, it was not the passage of legislation, or even the development of effective treatment, that led to the decline …
Equitable Access To Biomedical Advances: Getting Beyond The Rights Impasse, Wendy K. Mariner
Equitable Access To Biomedical Advances: Getting Beyond The Rights Impasse, Wendy K. Mariner
Faculty Scholarship
In 1988, gay rights activists and supporters demonstrated outside a Food and Drug Administration building demanding unrestricted access to experimental drugs being tested for the treatment of human immunodeficiency virus ("HIV") infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome ("AIDS").2 Across the ocean in France, in October of the same year, came an equally insistent demand from women's groups, scientists, and family planning agencies that the pharmaceutical company Groupe Roussel Uclaf put its abortifacient RU 486 back on the market.' Early in 1989, people were outraged when newspapers reported that New Hampshire's Medicaid program would not pay for a life-saving bone marrow …
The Right Of Elderly Patients To Refuse Life-Sustaining Treatment, George J. Annas
The Right Of Elderly Patients To Refuse Life-Sustaining Treatment, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
Some legislation, such as law permitting living wills, has addressed the problem of decisions regarding life-sustaining treatment for the elderly. Most of the developing law on the subject is, however, being made by the courts, often in prospective decisions about treatment. These rulings have followed a variety of approaches to the ends of protecting incompetent patients and enforcing the right of the competent to make their own decisions.
The Right To Refuse Treatment: A Model Act, George J. Annas
The Right To Refuse Treatment: A Model Act, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
Although the right to refuse medical treatment is universally recognized as a fundamental principle of liberty, this right is not always honored. A refusal can be thwarted either because a patient is unable to competently communicate or because providers insist on continuing treatment. To help enhance the patient's right to refuse treatment, many states have enacted so-called "living will" or "natural death" statutes. We believe the time has come to move beyond these current legislative models, and we therefore propose a Model Act that clearly enunciates an individual's right to refuse treatment, does not limit its exercise to the terminally …