Prof. of Law and Pediatrics, University of New Mexico

After Robert Schwartz received an undergraduate philosophy degree and a law degree, he served as legal research associate at The High Court of American Samoa in Pago Pago and then became a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Hastings Center.  He has been teaching at the University of New Mexico since 1976.  He has had Fulbright grants in India and Spain, and he has taught at the University of Tasmania in Australia.  He is a co-author of Health Law (Fifth edition), and he is the author of many articles on bioethics. In 2005 he received the Jay Healey Award as the Health Law Teacher of the Year from the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics.

What forms of body modification should be medicalized, and where can the advantages of medicalization be gained in other ways?  Will medicalization undermine some of the purposes of body modification (like rebellion and spiritually valuable pain)? And, finally, and, for health care providers, most significantly, what are the ethical obligations of physicians who are asked by a patient to participate in body modification?  Is the health care provider limited to providing treatment, and thus only available when the modification is “therapeutic”?  What should a surgeon say when he is confronted with a patient who demands that his arm be severed for therapeutic purposes (“it will exorcise my demons”)?