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, …