When Patients Request Specific Interventions

The issue of rights to health care has generated considerable controversy in recent years.1 Most discussions of such rights center on broad social issues (e.g., the access of certain socioeconomic or sociocultural groups to the health care system) and not on the individual physician–patient relationship. This essay considers a different and somewhat neglected issue, that of a patient's right to a specific medical intervention in the narrower context of the physician–Patient encounter. The concern here is not patients' general claims to health care, but rather the extent to which an individual patient (having already gained access to the system) is . . .