Healthcare attorney Michael H Cohen was quoted in The New Physician for insights into informed consent issues, and medicine and spirituality.
In A Sacred Space: Navigating Religion and Spirituality in Medical Situations (The New Physician, February 2013), reporter JoAnna Haugen drew on Michael’s work from Healing at the Borderland of Medicine and Spirituality and other books, and quoted Michael as follows:
“When we fall ill, we’re vulnerable,” says Michael H. Cohen, president of the Michael H. Cohen Law Group and a health care attorney in Los Angeles. “It can be a spiritual crisis as well as an emotional crisis, so I think these two categories – medical and spiritual are overlapping.”
Using Michael’s work on medical paternalism vs. shared decision-making, the article continued:
There needs to be a shift away from the value of medical paternalism, where the doctor knows best, toward a situation of shared decision-making, where the value of patient autonomy is much more emphasized. “This allows for a model of greater patient participation, where both can work together to find the best outcome,” Cohen says.
The article also drew on Michael’s work as to informed consent for complementary and alternative medical therapies and integrative medicine:
“There is a legal right to care for your own body and not to have medical procedures forced upon you,” Cohen says. One of the key components of patient autonomy is informed consent, which includes adequate information about the risks and benefits of all reasonable and feasible treatment options, and which doctors have an obligation to provide. If a patient wants to pursue an alternative to the recommended treatment, physicians should work with her to ensure it has the best chance of success.
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