Even the witless caricature on the cover—depicting an enraged doctor murdering a patient while waving an informed consent form in front of his eyes (doctors really didn't come up with this; it's the work of ethicists and lawyers)—gives a hint that ethicists and lawyers will want to wriggle out of other messes they've created, just as they did with this opus of theirs. And indeed they do.

If anyone expects to find guidance on how to approach certain dilemmatic situations (e.g., home birth), they will be disappointed. You will find various opinions here, including a mild critique of the European Court of Human Rights, but nothing to hold on to will be sought in vain. The authors from the Faculty of Law do point us to the legal duality arising from the legal confusion between healthcare service laws and the Civil Code, but they offer no solutions for navigating this uncertainty.

The very first chapter on human rights could be summarized in a single sentence (which is also quoted here): What began as respect for the person has become a formal "respect for autonomy". Academic musings on informed consent are of little practical use to us (the well-known acronym "pohopl").

My colleague Mr. Mauer still hasn't realized that Margaret Talbot is a well-known journalist-columnist, and in his effort to make her more visible, he once again masculinizes her. That wouldn't be so terrible as his acrobatics on the topic of paternalism. I am of the opinion that similar texts should be written—or, if they lack the inclination, at least reviewed—by people who are genuinely in practice, so that they contain what actually happens, rather than what the creators of such texts imagine.

And because the entire publication carries this spirit, reflections on how things should be, but aren't, and no self-reflection that it is precisely this group that invents, introduces, codifies, and enforces these follies—that, just like various auditors and norm-setters, they are people who have no idea how things work in clinical practice, and that they might want to improve. Not at all!

In my notes for this title, I therefore added the abbreviation ŠV—which is my shorthand for the phrase: škoda vočí (waste of eyesight).

MUDr. Radkin Honzák psychiatrist Author's blog: http://blog.aktualne.cz/blogy/radkin-honzak.php