Dr. Georgina Campelia and Susan Mason discuss health impacts on the disenfranchised, the myth of believing that people can't recover from substance use, the value of consultants to help providers treat marginalized patients, etc., in a fascinating discussion with Preston Reynolds, MD, PhD, MACP.
More on the Hastings Center Report...
Abstract: In this era of rapidly advancing biomedical technologies, it is not unusual for parents of children with profound cognitive disabilities to ask clinicians to provide invasive life‐sustaining treatments. Parental requests for such interventions pose a moral dilemma to the treating medical team, as there may be a discrepancy between the team's perception of the child's best interest and the apparent rationale underlying a parent's request. This gap highlights the limitation of the best interest standard in cases where, due to a neurodevelopmental disorder or brain injury, the child's capabilities are severely limited and their interests may be difficult to discern. The harm principle is also inadequate for decision‐making in response to these parental requests. To address these limitations, and inspired in part by John Arras's work on the relational potential standard, we propose an integration of care ethics within pediatric decision‐making using a new version of this standard. The potential for children to be in caring and loving relationships with their parents, what we will call “relational potential,” may provide an ethical justification for clinicians to support parental requests for life‐sustaining treatments.
