For this paper, I decided to focus on the case titled, "The Nurse and Informed Consent." Basically, the case involved a registered nurse, Nurse L who decided to inform her patient, Michael G about alternative natural therapies for his terminal leukemia. Although she was concern for Michael G’s health, her actions caused her nursing license to be revoked by Michael G’s head oncologist. This, as result, has raised a few ethical questions that I will be answering throughout this paper. These questions are:
1. Was Nurse L acting in a morally correct way when she gave Michael G the information?
2. Should the physician in charge have the final word about the information the patient receives?
3. If Michael G did not know about the alternative therapies, was his agreement to chemotherapy informed consent? To help support my position on these ethical questions, I will refer to Helga Kulse’s analogy of the contemporary nurse and Howard Bordy’s transparency standard. I will also present Lisa H. Newton’s analogy of the traditional nurse and the Presidents Commission of the Values of Informed consent as counter arguments and explain why such arguments are incorrect.
Before stating my position for the first question of this case, I considered the role of Nurse L, and what rights she has as a medical professional in a hospital setting. Understanding such role within the medical field has been a very controversial issue since the role of a nurse has evolved throughout history (Biomedical Ethics p. 95) I believe that today, nurses are more of advocates for their patients and have to hold more responsibility for such position which was not the case back then. This is due to the drastic shift in the way women were treated as individuals throughout history, which Helga Kulse helps explain. According to Kulse, the nurse role, known for its subservience, was generally given to women while the doctor role, known for its leadership, was generally...