BossTamsin (imported) wrote: Thu Dec 23, 2010 7:23 am Quite honestly, I can agree with being allowed to refuse testosterone treatment. But as far as the rest is concerned...
Even if there's a 1% chance that you could regret it later, and so long as you're legally allowed to come back and sue the hell out of the doc for doing the procedure, it's not gonna be an 'on demand' type of surgery.
Shit like the McDonalds coffee incident, or any number of other court cases these days, only reinforces the opinion that it's better to turn away 1,000 people than to risk even one who might come back and sue. (I seem to recall hearing of someone, I think in Florida, who went so far as to fake psychiatric letters for SRS, only to regret it afterwards. They then successfully sued the doctor for performing the surgery, on the basis that the doc should have checked the letters more carefully. My Google-fu is failing me for a reference, however.)
Frankly, I can't see the medical establishment ever adopting anything other than a rigid checklist of some kind for these kinds of procedures. Partly to ensure that those who do get the operation know what they're getting into and are stable enough to understand the consequences, but mostly to cover their own asses in the likely event that one of their patients decides it was a huge mistake a couple years down the road.
IEunuch, I couldn't agree with you more. It's far to easy to sue someone else today for one owns mistakes.
While I don't necessarily care for the Standards of Care, I do understand why they are there and followed by almost all doctors involved with this type of surgery.