When you think about it, having choices taken away from you isn’t too much unlike being in prison. In prison, you are under the care of other people and are not the one making the final decision about medical treatment. Since, now people almost never directly pay for medical treatment, the situation isn’t entirely different “on the outside.”

So I thought this story was interesting:

Barely a month after he appeared in an Albuquerque courtroom complaining of filthy food and foul treatment at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, Astorga, 31, was back Thursday to grouse about what his attorney called treatment tantamount to medical malpractice.

Defense attorney Gary Mitchell said that even after agreements were made last month to improve his client’s care while waiting for trial, doctors refused to perform diagnostic tests such as an MRI or CT scan to determine what was causing Astorga’s chronic back pain.

“I think I know exactly what’s going on here,” Mitchell told state District Judge Neil Candelaria. “They don’t want to pay for it.”

But Department of Corrections medical director Stephen Vaughn testified that such tests were not warranted and that Astorga had refused the physical therapy and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medication he had been prescribed.

An X-ray of Astorga’s back in August found no particular issue, Vaughn said.

Mitchell countered that Astorga refused the treatment because he first wants to know what’s wrong with his back.

“We’re not asking for the world,” Mitchell said.

The judge denied Astorga’s motion for medical treatment, saying the Department of Corrections appeared to be providing reasonable care and that Astorga was refusing care.

Basically, because a prisoner has limited control of his life, and none of his own resources to use, he is pretty much reduced to either trusting his guardian doctors or second-guessing and suing them to get his way.  In this case, other than the court costs, it looks like the story ended with the right results (as far as I can tell from the newspaper report).  But, in this case, no one died or was disabled, so no one had a motive to try to blame their condition on the nearest doctor.

In a situation where anything that goes wrong will be blamed on doctors, one can guess that institutions are going to mandate unreasonable tests and scans in order to manage the risk of being sued.