Paternalism And Paternalism

716 Words2 Pages

First and foremost, I would like to explain the difference between paternalism and autonomy and talk about their differences. Paternalism is defined when doctors restrict their patient’s opinion for their own good, tricking them into thinking their opinion is not the right decision. In comparison to a father and child’s relationship, the father makes the decision for the child because they know what is best for them and what is not, paternalistic doctors follow the same idea with their patients. Paternalism prohibits the patient being allowed to form their own opinion, since paternalistic doctors follow the “doctor’s knows best” attitude.
Autonomy is known as free-will, freely allowing their patient to form their own opinion about their own …show more content…

So they proceed to tell their patient that radiation is going to be chosen for their type of treatment. Doctor’s know because of their medical knowledge and expertise that radiation would be the best treatment option for this particular type of aggressive cancer so they’re ultimately going to go with that. Imagine how the patient is feeling at that moment, not only is he/she scared about their recent diagnosis, the patient also wasn’t even allowed to give informed consent for the radiation treatment since the radiation treatment was already chosen for him/her. Doctor’s ethical duties are that they must provide all of the options to their patients and then allow them to make their own decision once they see “the big picture”. Since the doctor has a paternalistic outlook due to all of his medical background and knowledge about this type of cancer he knew that the radiation treatment would be the best treatment to follow. Unfortunately depending on how much medical knowledge the patient has he didn’t even give him/her the opportunity to know any of her other options and forgot to think of her as a person rather than just another …show more content…

Even though the doctor knows with all of his medical background and expertise that radiation would be the best option for her, he still let’s her know that she could do radiation, chemo, or any other options that she may have and explains each of them to assure that she doesn’t have any other questions and is informed about all of them. He then allows all of her options to be laid out and then allows her to form her own opinion based on all of the information that was given to

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