Page 19 - Ethics and Law

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Autonomy

▪ Patient autonomy, in the clinical context, is the moral right on the part of the patient
to self-determination concerning one’s own health care.

o whenever a health care professional restricts, or otherwise impedes, a patient’s
freedom to determine what is done, by way of therapeutic measures, to oneself,

and attempts to justify such an intrusion by reasons exclusively related to the

well-being, or needs, of that patient, that health care professional can be

construed to have acted paternalistically.