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Autonomy and Paternalism in Health Policy: Currents in Contemporary Bioethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Mark A. Rothstein
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Extract

In the United States the delivery of health care traditionally has been hierarchical and strictly controlled by physicians. Physicians typically provided patients with little information about their diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment plan; patients were expected to follow their physicians’ orders and ask no questions. Beginning in the 1970s, with the widespread adoption of the doctrine of informed consent to treatment, the physician-patient relationship began to be more collaborative, although the extent of the change has been subject to debate. At a minimum, physicians began to give patients more information and asked them to consent to recommended treatment, the therapeutic privilege to withhold information from patients lost support and eventually was repudiated, and physicians embraced — at least in theory — a more patient-centered conception of health care.

More recently, health care and health promotion activities have moved beyond clinical encounters and the strict confines of physician-patient interactions.

Type
JLME Column
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , Winter 2014 , pp. 590 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2014

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