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Previous Volume 351:420-422 July 29, 2004 Number 5 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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I was called in to see a man I did not know. No one knew him. His usual doctor was on vacation, and the social worker who paged me was covering for another social worker.

"Can't it wait a week?" I asked. The patient had been in the hospital for three years without a psychiatric evaluation.

"I don't think so," the social worker said. "He hasn't taken food or fluids for two days. But," she added, trying to encourage me, "he does take every pill."

The consultation question was the patient's competence. Did he mean to kill himself? The chart . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

From Harvard Medical School, Boston.

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