1. Other things being equal. Countervailing considerations concerning the secondary effects that a patient's refusal might have on others - burdening the state with the support of small children, for example, or creating a public health hazard because the patient has a dangerous and highly communicable disease - might override the prima facie case for honouring a patient's refusal of treatment
2. A good recent article that rejects the standard position outright is Eastman
3. The coin came up tails
4. Actually other values are present. We can ignore them for the nonce, however;see below, But; section V
5. One might also attempt to resolve it by distinguishing between competence tout court and limited or intermittent competence. (For this distinction, see Beauchamp T and Childress J, Pnrnciples of biomedical ethics,1979