• J Palliat Med · Apr 2014

    Case Reports

    When open-ended questions don't work: the role of palliative paternalism in difficult medical decisions.

    • Eric Roeland, Julia Cain, Chris Onderdonk, Kim Kerr, William Mitchell, and Kathryn Thornberry.
    • 1 Moores Cancer Center, University of California San Diego , California.
    • J Palliat Med. 2014 Apr 1;17(4):415-20.

    AbstractAbstract The balance between patient autonomy and medical paternalism must be reexamined. The tension between autonomy and paternalism is both an ethical and practical issue. Autonomy is the current gold standard approach to patient communication and has grown to the point that patient preference dictates care, even when their choices are not possible or are medically nonbeneficial. Furthermore, we have observed a trend among physicians to avoid making difficult medical decisions by hiding behind a shield of patient autonomy. Paternalism, characterized as the antithesis of autonomy, is widely dismissed as having any role in medicine. We disagree and believe that paternalism still has an important role in medical decision making.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…