I’m all in favour of patient choice, but I think I would like to feel I was fully informed about the BRAN (benefits, risks, alternatives and what happens if by contrast you do Nothing) of the technique from an impartial source, and not from a doctor desperate to experiment. So desperate indeed that they circumvented the normal procedures. It can be read two ways - that they were so anxious to offer the best chance to their patients that they were willing to bend the rules, or that they were so careless of the consequences to the patient that they bent the rules. Who knows? The reason that nearly all medical systems have checks and balances in places to monitor experiments performed on the public is because a doctor may surely be as fallible as anyone else.
Someone under a death sentence from an incurable illness may not be best placed to make objective decisions about their treatment, especially when doctors can present the same treatment from very difficult angles and give an entirely different impression of the risks and benefits. I don’t think seeing this as a challenge to patient autonomy is a particularly helpful way to view it.
