Reviews for Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees

The average rating for Handbook for Health Care Ethics Committees based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-21 00:00:00 Joaquin Silveira 4.5 stars. This book is old, especially by medical progress standards (originally published 1984), so informed consent was just barely a thing and some of the author's skepticism about it feels overdone in retrospect. But I think historical context on issues of doctor-patient communication is very important, and it's very interesting to see which of Katz's predictions (both about the legal status of informed consent and in general) have come true and which did not. He also is a big proponent of psychoanalysis and most of his psychological theorizing is based on it, so that rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. But otherwise he makes very valuable and thought-provoking points about the relationships between doctors and patients (the section about dying patients is particularly excellent), uses very effective examples, and writes excellently. Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for historical perspective on doctor-patient communication or relationship issues or the early history of informed consent laws.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-15 00:00:00 Kim Mills An established classic in bioethics, this book is a kind of manifesto for Shared Decision Making. Its heart is in the right place, and its advocacy of honest, open communication between clinicians and patients is spot on. I found, though, that the book has multiple factual errors (including a strange nested error relating to the advent of the term "informed consent" in legal scholarship) and its reliance on freudianism as an actual account of human cognition and consciousness wears thin quickly. But the strong advocacy for something so clearly important as shared decision making makes it relatively easy to overlook the problems in the book. For historians of shared decision making and bioethics, this is a key text.