Healthy Choices

I read this article in today's Washington Post about various legal proposals that would allow doctors, nurses and pharmacists the right to refuse treatment (abortions, birth control, stem cell research, euthansia) that causes the moral consternation.

It took me half a second not to have a problem with this. While I guess I could be considered socially liberal, I am also principled. I am a relativist. My socially liberal view is rooted in libertarianism. I think people are morally empowered to make their own choices however wrong I might think they are. It can sometimes lead to odd results (like being pro-choice, but anti-abortion).

If I am a relativist, then who am I to get into the choices physicians, nurses and pharmacists make in how they will treat people. Physicians make treatment choices all the time based on corporate pressures and economic pressures. If we substitute moral for economic concerns, how much worse are we as a society? It is a value judgment that makes one thing acceptable and another not acceptable. Value judgments are the least, well, valuable judgments we can make.

In any event, the whole medical world should be opened up to choices. Too often, doctors self-righteously and arrogantly prescribe plans of treatment that are borne out of their arrogance, not a dialogue with patients. Just as physicians might want to be empowered to treat on moral grounds, so too should patients have a say in their treatment by eliminating the information disequilibrium between them and doctors.

If medicine should be a moral dialogue, shouldn't the patient getting drug company A's drug know that drug company A paid for their doctor's golf trip last spring? Or that the same doctor won't prescribe the morning after pill, but is shtumping drug company A's local rep? I am just saying...