Doctors on the Edge: Will Your Doctor Break the Rules for You? [Hardcover]

Dr. Abrams has been a specialist for over forty years in obstetrics and here documents growing ethical issues in treatment options in Doctors on the Edge: Will Your Doctor Break the Rules for You? The case histories here illustrate how medical work is laden with moral and ethical decisions and gathers accounts of doctors faced with conflicts of principles. A fascinating set of insights medical students in particular will relish.

--Midwest Book ReviewA dilemma often has more than one ethically defensible response and always leaves you wondering,” writes the author, a Denver obstetrician-gynecologist and nationally known medical ethicist. Abrams, who also served as chair of the Ethics Committee of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, presents a baker’s dozen of dilemmas from medical practice, his own and others’. In a voice both tender and tough he tells each tale, disguised for confidentiality, as though it were his own. The stories have stranger-than-fiction power.

Having led myriad workshops, Abrams weaves in explanations of how law, medicine, and religion have wrangled with topics like informed consent, patient autonomy, threats to public health, and the right to die. “You will find some of them difficult to condemn and some difficult to condone,” he writes, about doctors who sometimes lie, evade, or stretch the law to the breaking point.

From the outset the good doctor takes readers on a plunge into the deep end. “Andrea” was a male for two decades before changing by surgery into her truer gender. She could not bear childrlƒ5