The Practice of Autonomy: Patients, Doctors, and Medical Decisions

by Carl E. Schneider

Overview

This is a book written across the grain of contemporary ethics, where the principle of autonomy has triumphed.It is an attempt to see the law of medicine, the principles of bioethics, and the encounter between doctor and patient from the patient's point of view. While Schneider agrees that many patients now want to make their own medical decisions, and virtually all want to be treated with dignity and solicitude, he argues that most do not want to assume the full burden of decision-making that some bioethicists and lawyers have thrust upon them. What patients want, according to Schneider, is more ambiguous, complicated, and ambivalent than being "empowered." In this book he tries to chart that ambiguity, to take the autonomy paradigm past current pieties into the uncertain realities of modern medicine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195113976
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/29/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	9.48(w) x 6.32(h) x 1.11(d)

Table of Contents

1. The Autonomy Paradigm2. Patients Preferences About Autonomy: The Empirical Evidence3. The Reluctant Patient: Can Abjuring Autonomy Make Sense? 4. How Can They Think That: Of Information, Control, and Complexity5. Reconsidering Autonomy: Evaluating the Arguments For Mandatory Autonomy6. Beyond the Reluctant Patient: Autonomy in New Times

Editorial Reviews

[T]he exercise of autonomy in the medical context is frequently rather messier and more complicated than the prevailing bioethical theory and law would have us believe. Every physician who cares for patients knows this, and University of Michigan law professor Carl Schneider explicates this reality cogently in the most comprehensive, organized summary and analysis to date of the quantitative and qualitative empirical research on the actual process of medical decision making. Complemented by a thorough examination of the voluminous literature of memoirs by former patients and by Schneider's own studies of patients with renal disorders, the result is a scholarly, insightful rejection of the contemporary bioethical wisdom that the making of complex medical decisions can be reduced to a single, uniform, legally enforceable model.

New England Journal of Medicine