Gawande has no doubt that giving patients more responsibility for what their doctors do has greatly improved the quality of medical care they receive. But he also suggests that the shift in responsibility has gone too far: The new orthodoxy about patient autonomy has a hard time acknowledging an awkward truth: patients frequently don’t want the freedom that we’ve given them. That is, they’re glad to have their autonomy respected, but the exercise of that autonomy means being able to relinquish it. Gawande goes on to describe a family medical emergency in which his own newborn daughter Hunter
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