Providing proper health care to prisoners is often more of a myth than a reality. Nonetheless, prison officials contend that the death of a prisoner due to inadequate medical care both undermines the confidence of society in the prison system, and can create an “explosive reaction” from other inmates who view the death as preventable. Therefore it is probably not surprising that when 24-year-old Kenneth Myers, serving seven to ten years at MCI Concord, a medium security prison in Massachusetts, refused to consent to hemodialysis for the treatment of chronic glomerulonephritis and uremia, prison officials went to court to obtain an order permitting them to forceably treat him.