BMJ 1995;310:935 (8 April)

Letters

Patients' trust must be respected

EDITOR,--When I empathised with the patient in the medicolegal case discussed by John Mitchell and others (that is, I considered what I might feel if I were her) I felt that I too would have been perturbed.1 Putting aside complex issues of consent, I hope that a simple emphatic account of her experience and a comment may elucidate the core problem of her complaint.

"As a married woman of 22, I went in for a straightforward tooth extraction, needing, I presumed, straightforward general anaesthesia. Particularly as I was going to be fully clothed while I was under general anaesthesia, it would not have crossed my mind that a man of over 40 was planning to push a foreign body into my rectum. To have this rectal insertion explained to me afterwards as a fait accompli would have been bad enough. I then, however, found an unusual and unexpected discharge oozing . . . [Full text of this article]


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Relevant Article

A fundamental problem of consent
John Mitchell
BMJ 1995 310: 43-46. [Extract] [Full Text]

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