Introduction: While health care professionals understandably comprise the main audience for discussions of medical ethics, it does not follow that medical ethics are in practice determined solely by the actions and decisions of health care professionals alone. As in other situations involving ethical decisions in a medical setting, a transaction of sorts takes places between health provider and patient.   For example, as health-care professionals, we recognize that optimal decision making during health care is shared between the provider and the patient.  If it is true that ‘patients and health professionals share both process of decision-making and the ownership of the decision made’,  then it is not wrong to say that patients have their own share of responsibility in health care . Responsibility is possibly higher for physiotherapy patients, whose involvement in the consistent and effective application of treatment is significant, much bigger than in other health care settings, and may even be decisive.

If the physiotherapeutic patient is more responsible, does this mean that the responsibility of the physiotherapist is possibly less than other health care professionals, or the physiotherapist’s responsibility is unchanging detached from the patients’ attitudes?

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