Department of Bioethics, National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, USA.
Hastings Cent Rep. 2010 Sep-Oct;40(5):36-45. doi: 10.1353/hcr.2010.0001.
When patients cannot make their own treatment decisions, surrogates typically step in to do it for them. Surrogate decision-making is far from ideal, of course, as the surrogate may not know what the patient prefers or what best promotes her interests. One way to improve it would be to arm surrogates with information about what patients in similar circumstances tend to prefer, allowing them to make empirically grounded predictions about what their patient would want.
当患者无法自行做出治疗决策时，通常会由代理人来代其做出决策。当然，这种代理决策并不理想，因为代理人可能并不了解患者的偏好或什么最能促进患者的利益。一种改进方法是为代理人提供有关类似情况下患者通常偏好的信息，使他们能够根据经验对患者的需求做出预测。
