Physicians and truth telling

In the magazine Newsweek, Mack Lipkin wrote an article titled “On Telling Patients the Truth.” In this piece, he summarizes his belief that medical information should be withheld from the patient because it is impossible to be completely truthful. This action is justified because patients won’t be able to understand the information, misinterpretation often occurs, and some people just don’t want to know the truth. I disagree with Lipkin’s thesis. I believe that physicians have a moral obligation to tell their patients relevant information about their disease, unless the patient clearly states that he/she does not want to hear it. Patients should be given this information because medicine is patient-centered, communication is necessary to build trust in a patient-doctor relationship, and withholding the truth seems to be more harmful to the patient in the long run.

One crucial point that Lipkin fails to recognize is that medicine is patient-centered. Even though medicine has changed via technological advances, healthcare coverage, and ethics, one thing has remained constant – medicine provides care for the patient. More than that, medicine (especially primary care) emphasizes treating the patient as a person, not a diagnosis. In the story Being Mickey’s Doctor, the pediatrician who treats ten-year-old Mickey learns valuable lessons about being humanistic and compassionate. Mickey was a talkative child who would let Dr. Morhimann (the pediatrician) know the good and bad things about her treatment. She would complain when the doctors had conversations right outside her door, and didn’t like when Dr. Morhimann talked to Mickey’s siblings about the disease in a way that made it seem like the disease had replaced Mickey. The main point...

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...sis, not the doctor.

In conclusion, doctors have a moral obligation to tell patients the truth about their illnesses, unless the patient clearly states that he or she does not want to know. Medicine is a field that works to treat the patient. This means that physicians are there for guidance, using expertise and years of education to guide them to a cure. This does not mean that a physician should make decisions about the patients without proper consent. Believing that patients will misunderstand the diagnosis, or assuming that they won’t want to know are not valid reasons for keeping information from the person. Communication is important in a medical setting, and is especially important when talking about the health of an individual. With relevant, appropriate and humanistic communication, telling a patient their diagnosis can and should be done in a caring way.