title: Reconceiving the therapeutic obligation.
abstract: The "therapeutic obligation" (TO) is a physician's duty to provide his patients with what he believes is the best available treatment. We begin by discussing some prominent formulations of the obligation before raising two related considerations against those formulations. First, they do not make sense of cases where doctors are permitted to provide suboptimal care. Second, they give incorrect results in cases where doctors are choosing treatments in challenging epistemic environments. We then propose and defend an account of the therapeutic obligation that solves the problems that undermined previous efforts at formulating the TO. We conclude by considering how apparent problems with our proposal actually rest on difficulties with informed consent.
authors.affiliation: *Department of Philosophy, Franklin and Marshall College, PO Box 3003, Lancaster, PA 17604-3003, USA. david.merli@fandm.edu.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Merli
authors.forename: Joshua A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D028681:Moral Obligations; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D010820:Physicians / Q000941:ethics*; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians' / Q000941:ethics*; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic / Q000941:ethics
keywords: randomized clinical trials; suboptimal treatment options; therapeutic obligation