As the clinical picture of a patient evolves over time, more information becomes available. Certain procedure require time to perform, causing delay between the time when the tests are ordered and when the results are available. Furthermore, as the patient's condition changes over time, serial measurements can be made. The availability of more data allows a more accurate assessment of the patie...

In the past, minors were not considered legally capable of making medical decisions and were viewed as incompetent because of their age. The authority to consent or refuse treatment for a minor remained with a parent or guardian. This parental authority was derived from the constitutional right to privacy regarding family matters, common law rule, and a general presumption that parents or guard...

Analysis of medical students' formulations and replies to clinical problems indicates difficulty in deciding on the nature and organization of treatment. A programme describing a problem-solving approach was devised, and students taught in this way were shown to be significantly more able to formulate organized treatment plans with more precise aims. It is suggested that problem-solving methods...

I want to argue the case for the evaluative clinical sciences and the need to support a national program to assess the outcomes of medical care. For too long, and at peril to the welfare of patients and the public as well, we have neglected that essential part of medical science whose job it is to establish the validity of clinical theory and help physicians and patients reach the right decisio...

We describe the application of assumption-based argumentation (ABA) to a domain of medical knowledge derived from clinical trials of drugs for breast cancer. We adapt an algorithm for calculating the admissible semantics for ABA frameworks to take account of preferences and describe a prototype implementation which uses variant-based parallel computation to improve the efficiency of query answe...

Recent advances in computing and developments in technology have facilitated the routine collection and storage of medical data that can be used to support medical decisions. In most cases however, there is a need for the collected data to be analysed in order for a medical decision to be drawn, whether this involves diagnosis, prediction, course of treatment, or signal and image analysis. Inte...

Stochastic Dominance (SD) criteria are decision making tools which allow us to choose among various strategies with only partial information on the decision makers' preferences. The notion of Stochastic Dominance has been extensively employed and developed in the area of economics, finance, agriculture, statistics, marketing and operation research since the late 1960s. For example, it may tell ...

John Coggon and José Miola The Cambridge Law Journal / Volume 70 / Issue 03 / November 2011, pp 523 ­ 547 DOI: 10.1017/S0008197311000845, Published online: 17 November 2011 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0008197311000845 How to cite this article: John Coggon and José Miola (2011). AUTONOMY, LIBERTY, AND MEDICAL DECISION­MAKING. The Cambridge Law Journal, 70, pp 52...

OBJECTIVE We studied and compared the attitudes of pregnant women v new mothers in an attempt to confirm changing patterns of maternal response towards medical ethical decision making in critically ill or malformed neonates. DESIGN Data were obtained by questionnaires divided into three sections: 1. sociodemographic; 2. Theoretical principles which might be utilised in the decision-making pro...

BACKGROUND Need for cognitive closure (NFCC) has been shown to be a consistent and measurable trait. It has effects on decision making and has been associated with more rapid decision making, higher reliance on heuristics or biases for decision making, reduced tolerance for ambiguity, and reduced interest in searching for alternatives. In medical practice, these tendencies may lead to lower qua...