LogFAQs > #963134543

DrPrimemaster posted...

It comes up in the show, she isnt getting better on non cheat disease so he has to decide how much trust he has in her.

House's understanding of how medical ethics and consent laws work is... shaky at times. There's a lot of embellishment for dramatic effect.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

The alternative required a few unstated details.
1) The s/o is unable to participate in the diagnosis.
2) We're not married since informed consent would fall on me to approve the treatment, and I would have assumed she didn't cheat.
3) A relative of the s/o is providing informed consent to approve the treatment.
4) That relative thinks the s/o probably cheated on me.
I just bypassed all of that and thought the s/o had approved the treatment on their own.

Alternatively, the intent of the hypothetical scenario was blatantly obvious, even without spelling out every possible detail that would be needed to restrict the potential options to those given, and looking for loopholes to get out of answering the real question is just being obnoxious and refusing to play along.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

A more interesting version of the question might be whether or not you as the S/O would give consent to allow them to be treated for the "cheating disease" or the other one, based on being advised by the doctors that the cheating disease is somewhat more likely, but not guaranteed.

That's a considerably easier question to answer, though, to the point that it constitutes enough of a conflict of interest that doctors would likely withhold the cheating variable to avoid influencing your decision. To use Disease C as the cheating one and Disease F and the faithful one:

Treatment C, Disease C: The cheater lives
Treatment C, Disease F: The faithful partner dies
Treatment F, Disease C: The cheater dies
Treatment F, Disease F: The faithful partner lives

Only one of those outcomes can actually be considered good. The rest all involve some combination of your SO cheating and/or dying. To that end, there's no reason anyone ever wouldn't choose Treatment F, especially given that the bad outcome is the death of somebody they might actually have considered killing themselves, presented in a manner where they are guaranteed to get away with it and can feel morally justified in the knowledge that their SO brought that fate upon themselves. It would be ferociously unethical to offer that choice to a patient's SO.