Exploring Ethics

Dr Deborah Bowman spent more than 20 years researching medical ethics, but a 2017 breast cancer diagnosis made her reconsider everything

What’s your speciality?

I am a specialist in medical ethics. I work on wards and in clinics as well as doing research and teaching. When there’s a moral question about what a clinician might do, or about what a patient wants, people come to me. High-profile cases include the Charlie Gard case, where the parents disagreed with the clinical team about the care for their very sick child. I wasn’t involved in that, but it’s an example of what people in my field do.

What’s the radio 4 programme Patient Undone about?

In autumn 2017 I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I started to think very differently about what I’d been doing for 25 years. I thought I’d made up my mind about things like choice and consent, and autonomy – the ability to make decisions for yourself. But I was struck by how frightening I found it to give consent, and I was surprised that things that I’d always really argued for, like copying patients in to letters, could actually be very difficult to bear and might not be as much of an unmitigated good as I thought it was.

Can you tell us more about your experiences of choice, consent and autonomy as a patient?

My experience was that I both wanted that power and struggled with it, all at the same time. It’s that contradiction that’s at the heart of Patient Undone. There was still a very rational part of me that absolutely believed my body, my choice, my life. I needed information to make decisions.