Moral integrity of professions.
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The author congratulates Dr Brian Hurwitz, who recently reported the successful "intimidation" of an elderly competent widow into accepting badly needed therapy for a huge ulcerated carcinoma. He reports approvingly of the Israeli Patients' Rights Law, enacted in 1996, which demands detailed informed consent from competent patients before permitting treatment. But the law also provides an escape clause which permits coercing a competent patient into accepting life-saving therapy if an ethics committee feels that if treatment is imposed the patient will give his/her consent retroactively. He suggests this approach as an appropriate middle road between overbearing paternalism and untrammelled autonomy.
OBJECTIVE: Physicians are encouraged to actively involve patients in clinical decision-making, but this expectation has not been adequately examined from the physicians' perspective. Our objective was to identify and characterize physicians' attitudes toward patient participation in decision-making and to gain insight into how they consequently think about and structure the decision-making process. DESIGN: This was a qualitative cross-sectional study of physicians' reported attitudes and practices. SETTING: The study took place in private practice and academic physicians' practices. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 53 academic and private practice physicians from primary care and surgical specialties, ranging from first year residents to recently retired, participated in the study. MEASUREMENTS: We performed a qualitative analysis of semistructured individual interviews. RESULTS: The physicians in this study expressed consistently positive attitudes toward patient participation in medical decision-making. They identified patient autonomy as an essential justification for patient participation but often went beyond an autonomy-based rationale. Several were motivated by the fundamental principle of beneficence as well as their own self-interest in avoiding legal liability. Many physicians saw their role as an expert who educates the patient but retains control over the decision-making process; others took a more collaborative approach, encouraging patients to assume decisional priority. The decision-making process often was modified by patient, physician, and environmental factors. CONCLUSIONS: The physicians in this study demonstrated a positive, flexible approach toward including patients in decision-making. A one-dimensional model of shared decision-making based solely on the principle of autonomy fails to account for variability in how physicians allocate decisional priority and is therefore ethically inadequate.
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