부산대학교 도서관

Anorexia nervosa (AN) patients present clinically with a preoccupation on food, weight, and an obsessive worry about being fat, which persists as the patient becomes emaciated due to starvation. When standard treatment courses involving feeding programs (often alongside other therapy) are met with patient resistance or refusal, as is often the case, the patient indirectly risks death as the illness progresses, though not typically presenting with an active death wish. This paper explores how healthcare providers are to ethically balance the duty to uphold and respect patient autonomy and their duty of care in treating the illness. Entailed in this complex question are the following important considerations: To what extent can patients with Anorexia Nervosa be considered competent agents? To what extent do the pathological characteristics of the illness influence both patient autonomy and how it ought to be considered? To what extent, and when, can and should healthcare providers ethically override patient autonomy? Finally, this paper explores how these cases and those of chronic, refractory anorexia pose challenges to our current ethicolegal framework for conceptualizing and upholding patient autonomy in healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]