| Research Abstract |
The medical thoughts, has continued since ancient Greece, has received the great revolutionary change at the 70's of American society. Peorle questioned the arbitrary power of doctors and insisted the right of self-determination of patients, as well as repudiate doctors treat oatients as the objects of manipulation. Then gradually, the shared decision making of doctors and patients was institutionalized, based on the informed consent.
The aims of this study are to analyze the actual conditions of doctor-patient relationship in contemporary United States, and to make clear the real situation of revolution of medical thoughts' in America. For that sake I tried to do the participant observation and some interview with the medical people and patients at the New York Children's Hospital and the Medical Center as well as the Medical School of Columbia University.
As the results of this field research, I can make clear the following points.
(1) Many professions other than doctors, bioethicists,
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medical sociologists, medical social workers, psychologists, take part in at the hospitals of the United States.
(2)Patients and members of their family can look freely at teir chant (Karte).
(3)Nurses, not doctors, take the responsibility to manage the words.
(4)The informed consent is institutionalized firmly.
(5)People including patients agree that medical professins must get the informed consent from all patient, even though they are children, mental patients. Therefore many hospitals provide a lots of means for even chidren and mental patients to be able to understand their own conditions of deseases, for example, videos, pictures, panels, so on.
(6)There appeared a lots or disputes about problems presented by the advanced medical technologies, then developed the interdisciplinary research of philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, sociology, and medical sciences.
(7)Among them, medical sociology play the very important roles to criticize the individualistic bias and the absolutization of the right of self-determination of bioethics. On the basis of these results, I would advance to make clear the change of doctors-patients relationship concretely by the field research.
As regard to the conditions of Japan not receiving baptism of medical thoughts revolution, not institutionalized the informed consent, I think we can get the great fruits if we throw the light on American theoretical efforts during the development of medical thoughts revolution. Less
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