Learning for life

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 …