McKinney, C. (2015). The American Journal of Bioethics, 15(7), 53–54 (2015)
As a former chronic, treatment-resistant anorexic, I would like to preface this commentary by saying that that I am incredibly grateful that mine was not considered a futile case despite meeting the widely accepted criteria of the time (Draper 2000). I also agree with Geppert’s (2015) conclusion that the illness itself may compromise a chronic patient’s ability to make a fully competent decision to reject treatment in order to continue to “live” with anorexia, to the extent that overriding her1 autonomy can be justified under weak paternalism, a view I have argued for strongly in my own work on the topic (McKinney 2010). I would also add that while treatment resistance should not be conflated with treatment futility, it must also be recognized that the illness provides benefits that are valuable to the patient (Abbate-Dega et al. 2013), including membership in a ready-made—and highly judgmental and competitive—community
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