Can stringent review help maintain patients rights more than other methods?
Imagine that you have a patient who never wanted to be on life support, but you don’t know this because the patient’s unable to speak for himself and doesn’t have a surrogate. Then the judicial review process takes three months and the patient is on life support, which is continued because in the absence of clear evidence, the courts generally err on the side of preserving life. In that setting, the argument that due process is protecting the patient’s rights is probably not true. That’s the hypothetical concern. It’s been well documented in the last 20 years that most patients do not want to die receiving a lot of highly technological, sometimes burdensome care. On balance, when physicians are thinking that it may be reasonable to withdraw life support and focus on comfort care, most of the time their attitudes are probably in accordance with the patient’s. This is tricky, though, because several studies suggest that physicians in general desire less life support than their patients d
