BMJ  2006;332 (4 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7536.0-f

Editor's choice

Learning for life

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

As doctors, how much should our moral values influence our clinical decisions?

When the footballer George Best was given a liver transplant for alcoholic liver disease, there were many dissenting voices. His continued drinking after the transplant further inflamed the moral outrage. A precious resource had been wasted, so people said, on a man who had brought his condition on himself and failed to change his lifestyle.

Commenting on his own similar case in our interactive case report, the patient, A Bond, doesn't think he should receive a transplant if he continues to drink, or even if he stops drinking (p 277). But as Paul Haber writes in an accompanying commentary (p 277), much adult illness is due to failure to change high risk behaviours. Clinicians must strike a balance between avoiding futile treatment and protecting recidivist patients from being stigmatised. In a rapid response (. . . [Full text of this article]

Fiona Godlee, editor

(fgodlee@bmj.com)


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