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

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Oxford University Press, 1998 - 307 pages
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.

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Contents

The Autonomy Paradigm
3
The Paradigm in Excelsis
9
The Paradigm in Crisis
32
Can Abjuring Autonomy Make Sense?
47
Of Information Control
109
for Mandatory Autonomy
137
Autonomy in New Times
181
Depersonalization of Medicine
195
Conclusion
229
Copyright

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About the author (1998)

Carl E. Schneider is at University of Michigan.

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