Autonomy and Clinical Medicine: Renewing the Health Professional Relation with the Patient

This book arises from a two-fold conviction. The first is that autonomy, despite recent critiques about its importance in bioethics and philosophy of medicine, and the traditional resistance of medicine to its "intrusion" into the doctor-patient relation, is a fundamental building block of an individual's identity and mechanisms for dealing with illness, disease, and incapacity. As such it is an essential component in the health care professional's armamentarium employed to bring about heal...