Is your doctor making critically important care decisions for you without you?
Patient autonomy is a term medical professionals use to describe patients’ rights to be informed and make care decisions for themselves—assuming there is not another friend or family member chosen to do it.
Elderly patients may have dementia, for instance. No one would expect them to be able to participate.
In the Feb. 8, 2007, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a startling study shows that as many as 40 million Americans may not be getting the whole story about treatment choices from doctors, based on their own moral objections.
Failing to disclose treatment options to patients is considered unethical
The study suggest that we patients may find ourselves in the care of doctors who ignore end-of-life treatment options or even our right to know about them.
Doctors also were questioned about contraception for teenaged girls without paretnal consent and abortion in this survey.
Paternalistic medicine was believed to be gone a long time ago.
Wrong.
If you believe it is your right to consider the facts and make your own care choices, please read this study.
We all will die some day. Most people feel strongly about how they wish to end of their lives. Physicians who will make that decision for you will make other decisions for you, too.
Patients and physicians need to have a clear understanding between them about the doctor’s views on what is and is not appropriate care. That will tell you whether you have a doctor who is a partner with you or who stil is practicing in the old-fashioned paternalistic style.
NEJM has published this study online, in full, free to the public.
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