Abstract
Jeffrey Spike argues that psychiatrists are often unnecessarily asked to assess the capacity of medical and surgical patients to make decisions about their health care. He maintains that the task properly belongs to the patients’ attending physicians (or, at last resort, to ethicists) who, because they have more opportunity to know the patient and are less burdened by assessment tools, are better equipped to judge such a situated, interactive capacity. To illustrate his point, he presents the cases of two relatively frail and “noncompliant” women who are threatened with consignment to nursing homes.
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Montgomery, K. (2004). How Not to Philosiphize with a Hammer. In: Thomasma, D.C., Weisstub, D.N. (eds) The Variables of Moral Capacity. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2552-5_8
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