This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • CME Course for This Article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Medical Ethics  • Nutrition/ Malnutrition  • World Health  • Human Rights  • War  • Alert me on articles by topic

Sondra S. Crosby, MD; Caroline M. Apovian, MD; Michael A. Grodin, MD

JAMA. 2007;298:563-566.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Prison hunger strikes present clinical, ethical, legal, and human rights challenges to physicians who care for hunger strikers. Controversy continues over the care of prisoners who are hunger striking at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.¹ The World Medical Association (WMA) has updated the Declaration of Malta with guidelines on care of hunger strikers,² and recent court opinions in the United States and Europe have attempted to define the obligations of physicians caring for hunger strikers in prison settings.³ This Commentary describes the medical aspects of starvation and examines the ethical, legal, and human rights dimensions of decision making by health care professionals caring for imprisoned patients who are hunger striking.

Prisoner Hunger Strikes

A hunger strike, by definition, is food refusal used as a form of protest or demand. Hunger strikes occur in various settings, but . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliations: Departments of Medicine (Drs Crosby and Apovian) and Psychiatry (Dr Grodin), Boston University School of Medicine, and Department of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights, Boston University School of Public Health (Drs Crosby and Grodin), Boston, Massachusetts.

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

Military Medical Ethics -- Physician First, Last, Always
Annas
NEJM 2008;359:1087-1090.
FULL TEXT