Who Is the Bigger Idiot? UAMS Doctors or the Lawyers Defending Them?

UAMS doctors Jordan Greer and Arthur Rezayev allegedly ordered or authorized a patient to be catheterized three times despite his adamant objections.

The patient did not merely complain. He deliberately pulled the Foley catheter out of his urethra on all three occasions.

Eventually, Dr. Greer and Dr. Rezayev allowed him to use a toilet.

The patient lived.

Think about that for a moment.

The Doctors Company, UAMS General Counsel, and the attorneys defending UAMS maintain that there was no negligence and no liability for the injuries allegedly inflicted during these procedures and the patient’s two weeks of involuntary hospitalization.

But who gave these doctors the authority to override the patient’s expressed wishes?

UAMS did not seek the appointment of an independent surrogate decision-maker. Instead, it chose not to appoint a surrogate and allowed its own medical personnel to assume that authority.

In other words, the institution whose physicians wanted to impose treatment also supplied the authority to make the decision to impose it.

Where was the independent decision-maker? Where was the patient’s voice?

Now, let’s consider something that happened today.

University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law Professor Theresa M. Beiner, who served as dean for five years, made the following statement during a lecture about the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and its progeny:

“A doctor is an idiot if they don’t get your informed consent before they actually perform any kind of procedure on you.”

I agree, Professor Beiner.

Informed consent is not some obscure technicality reserved for medical malpractice textbooks. It is a fundamental issue of bodily autonomy.

A patient does not surrender ownership of his body simply because he enters a hospital.

And a physician’s medical degree does not confer unlimited authority to override a patient’s expressed wishes.

Which brings me to the obvious question:

Who is the bigger idiot?

The UAMS doctors who allegedly performed procedures against a patient’s repeated and unmistakable objections?

Or the Arkansas defense attorneys, including attorneys at the Friday Firm, who insist that the doctors have no liability for doing so?

There is an additional institutional irony here.

UALR Bowen School of Law and UAMS are separate campuses within the University of Arkansas System. One educates future lawyers. The other trains physicians and provides medical care.

It is worth asking whether the principles of informed consent and bodily autonomy taught by a law professor at one University of Arkansas campus have any practical application when the conduct at issue occurs at another.

It is easy to lecture law students about informed consent and bodily autonomy.

It is considerably more difficult to defend denying autonomy when the defendant is UAMS.