Abstract

Owen, Freyenhagen, and Martin should be lauded for bringing the complexities of competence assessment and acquired brain injury to light. This discussion is often a difficult and vexed exercise for an array of conditions including ABI, and is usually a judgment that is critically important for determining whether or not a patient has the right to make their own decisions. There are a number of themes in their article that chime with ideas developed by Fulford about the nature of illness, and I suggest that, in addition to teasing out some subtleties of competence assessment, they have also explained, in a phenomenologically grounded way, why it is that we should consider ABI an illness.Tests of...