Few issues affecting the therapeutic professions are as much discussed and as little understood as informed consent. This book, written from the combined perspectives of a physician, a lawyer, and a social scientist, is the first reference work to provide a concise overview of informed consent with particular emphasis on the practical issues facing professionals. After introducing the ethical theories behind this principle, the authors describe the history and current status of the law, detailing all legal requirements for practitioners. They consider the problems faced when these theories and laws are applied in a clinical setting, offering suggestions for simplifying the interaction between doctor and patient and for making it clinically meaningful. The stress throughout is on ways to improve practitioners' performance in meeting these ethical and legal mandates. The book will be valuable for all professionals working in areas where issues of informed consent are likely to arise, including medicine, mental health care, social work, dentistry and law.

Informed Consent: Legal Theory and Clinical Practice

Medical Books

Appelbaum, Paul S.

Lidz, Charles W.

Meisel, Alan

Medicine

Oxford University Press

In few places in American society are adults so dependent on others as in nursing homes. Minimizing this dependency and promoting autonomy has become a major focus of policy and ethics in gerontology. Yet most of these discussions are divorced from the day-to-day reality of long-term care and are implicitly based on concepts of autonomy derived from acute medical care settings. Promoting autonomy in long-term care, however, is a complex task which requires close attention to everyday routines and a fundamental rethinking of the meaning of autonomy. This timely work is based on an observational study of two different types of settings which provide long-term care for the elderly. The authors offer a detailed description of the organizational patterns that erode autonomy of the elderly. Their observations lead to a substantial rethinking of what the concept of autonomy means in these settings. The book concludes with concrete suggestions on methods to increase the autonomy of elderly individuals in long-term care institutions.

The Erosion of Autonomy in Long-Term Care

History

Fischer, Lynn

Arnold, Robert M.

Europe

Examines the data on drug abuse in the late Sixties and early Seventies and concludes that there was probably no significant increase in the use of heroin. The crisis of drug abuse that many Americans perceived at the time was in fact a crisis of politics and morality. These findings lead the authors to fascinating and important revisions of theories of labelling and deviance.  ′The book has a broad perspective and, through analytical and theoretical means, gets at the heart of the important but neglected topic of the relationship between deviance, social control and morality...This is a must book for all serious students of deviant behaviour.′ -- Sociology, Jul/Aug 1981

Heroin, Deviance and Morality (SAGE Library of Social Research)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Walker, Andrew L.

Gould, Leroy C.

Addiction & Recovery

Sage Publications, Inc.

Hailed by its proponents as a doctrine that promises more equitable doctor-patient relationships, informed consent has also been decried as posing serious threats to the quality of care in this country. Ultimately, what is at stake in the controversy is nothing less than two equally entrenched but compelling strains in American legal and political history--the protection of individual autonomy versus societal regulation of individual freedom for the greater common good. In the case of psychiatric patients, the issue is further complicated because it is often precisely the patient's very capacity for autonomous action that is in question. Central to the ethical doctrine of informed consent is that patients not only be apprised of and give their written consent to a particular treatment--as required by law--but that they understand what the treatment entails and consent to it.

Informed Consent: A Study of Decisionmaking in Psychiatry

Zerubavel, Eviatar

Psychology & Counseling

The Guilford Press

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Books by Lidz, Charles W.