Letter to the Editor
The Ottawa Citizen
July 8, 2005
Treatment refusal is a right
RE: Fighting for the right to refuse treatment: Part 1 June 11.
Labelling Scott Starson the "poster child" of treatment refusal both sensationalizes and trivializes a central rights-protection issue.
As a rule, all adult individuals in Ontario are considered to be capable of consenting to treatment, unless found otherwise. According to the Health Care Consent Act, an individual must understand the information relevant to making a treatment decision and the reasonably foreseeable consequences of a decision to proceed or not.
Mr. Starson had the right to refuse treatment because the Supreme Court had determined that the Consent and Capacity Board had misapplied the test for capacity and the finding of incapacity was unreasonable given both the facts and the law. In presenting the majority decision, Justice John Major noted that "the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment is fundamental to a person's dignity and autonomy." Indeed, every individual basically enjoys the right to control what happens to his or her body.
The state's authority to deprive people of their right to refuse medical treatment must be counterbalanced by safeguards and a process that prevents this from being done easily or automatically. This is what the existing legislation strives to do: strike a balance between an individual's right to give or refuse consent and the right to have access to effective medical treatment. This takes into account that a person's capacity to consent to treatment might be diminished by an illness.
The critical and central question to address is whether an individual has the capacity to make treatment decisions. Individuals who are capable of consenting to treatment are free to make whatever decisions about their treatment they choose, even ones that others may consider unwise.
Stanley K. Stylianos
Toronto
Program Manager
Lori-Ann Leggett
Brockville
Patient Advocate
Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office
