Trabalho, Educação e Saúde - TES (Work, Education and Health) is an open access scientific journal, edited by the Joaquim Venâncio Polytechnic School of Health, from Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
The COVID-19 pandemic began in Brazil in March 2020. Since then, there have been several disagreements and disputes between health professionals, researchers and regulatory bodies about prescribed treatments for this infection. Given this scenario, this note proposes to discuss medical autonomy in the described context, based on official documents of the Brazilian Federal Council of Medicine, produced between 2020 and 2021, considering the mentioned therapeutic possibilities. As a result, three official documents were obtained that show that the only form of ‘autonomy’ is ‘medical autonomy’, while the ‘patient autonomy’ is not evidenced in terms of the adoption of therapies. We did not observe discussions in the documents about the bioethical principle of non- aleficence and that of autonomy itself. In this way, it can be seen that the appreciation of ‘medical autonomy’, without considering the knowledge/doings of patients, nor the scientific findings, can promote misunderstandings and harm the principles of medical practice.
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