Looking Into the Patient’s Autonomy

Ethics in Healthcare Settings

Thinking as health care practitioners, in your opinion should Mr. Speaker's autonomy as a person had taken precedence over the CDC's desire to enforce public health law? Explain you answer.

It has not been prioritized over the desire of the CDC to implement public health law. There exist other good reasons for valuing the autonomy of patients. Patients that are aware of their condition and have an understanding of the reasons for a course of treatment are more probable of sticking to prescriptions. Even when a doctor ought to communicate information of a depressing prognosis, sincerely notifying the patients provides them with a chance of putting their issues in order, to think of their lives as a whole, and to adopt the spiritual or practical measures, which they may know to be essential. Furthermore, if doctors develop a practice of holding back bad news from patients, the patients are less probable of trusting the reassurances given by the doctors when the bad news is not bad.

However, the majority criticizes this particular stress on the patient autonomy and asserts that the very first responsibility of a doctor is to do what is best suited for his patients. To provide complete information and give patients a chance to make vital decisions could lead several patients to make foolish decisions. The ethical claim of autonomy is certainly not applicable to the young kids, the severely mentally disabled, or even the patients who lack the ability to exercise autonomy (Struhkamp, 2005). However, the critic of autonomy maintains that even several patients that are technically "competent" are capable of making irrational and foolish decisions if doctors do not make the medical decisions on their behalf. For instance, a patient that is aware of the potentially unfavorable or risky side effects of treatment might actually decline what a doctor recognizes to be a useful therapy (Struhkamp, 2005).

The issue with this opposition is that it provides no cause as to why people ought to be treated as requiring protection from their irrational and foolish decisions after finding themselves in the medical system and yet are perceived as having the right of making free decisions regarding their own personal lives. It is essential to the self-respect of individuals that they be accorded the chance of making decisions regarding their own lives. Outside the medical surroundings, people encounter choices every bit as essential as those of patients: the selection of a marriage spouse; the choice of a career; the ongoing selection of what emphasis to accord to the quest of competing materialistic; moral as well as spiritual goals; even the probable life-and-death decision whether to consult a doctor or not (Struhkamp, 2005).

2. In your opinion, did the CDC act ethically in involuntarily quarantine Mr. Speaker? Explain you answer.