Re: Teenage decision-making in the context of the Jehovah's Witness faith (again)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To the Editor; Dr Harrison's article (1) debates when paediatricians should accept a teenager's refusal of potentially life-saving or life-prolonging treatment. The article addresses only one of three necessary elements of consent: competence. Not discussed are the two other requirements – adequate information and voluntariness. Full discussion of the three elements that are necessary for consent to medical treatment is particularly important when the adolescent patient is a member of a Jehovah's Witness (JW) family. This is a subject that can evoke strong emotions. Our paper (2) on this topic was published in the 2006 issue of Paediatrics & Child Health. Indeed, the governing body of JWs, the Watchtower Society (WTS), wrote to the Journal in protest over our then unpublished article, which had been accepted after two rounds of peer review. The editors of the Journal resisted the WTS's representations. Our article presented details about three real cases of adolescents who refused blood transfusions. In each case, the information we offered came from publicly available sources, such as court transcripts or reports of court hearings. Our article, therefore, had rich grounding in actual cases and in reported alleged practices of JWs, the WTS and WTS lawyers. By contrast, the Harrison article presented and then discussed a hypothetical case. There is a place for theoretical cases and commentary thereon, but we suggest that the Journal follow the Hasting's Center report's example. A recent edition of the Hasting's Center report (3) presented a short hypothetical case of a JW teenager, followed by two commentaries from different perspectives. Two commentaries are preferable to one because it is unlikely that one person can fairly represent all views in this controversial bioethics matter.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.033 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".