Ethics: When Doctors Lie

Jeff is an unmarried 26 years of age bookkeeper, goes to see a specialist since he has been having headaches which make it troublesome for him to amass at work. The specialist runs a few tests and finds that Jeff has an in-operational mind tumor, which will most likely kill him in a year.

Jeff has no children or spouse yet. Be that as it may, advising Jeff may make his health deteriorates all the more quickly. The doctor feels that only a few patients truly want to know they have a fatal illness. He, along these lines, chooses to concede revealing to Jeff his test results. Rather, he reveals to Jeff that he common headaches as a result of stress and endorses a few painkillers to help diminish the patient's side effects.

All things considered, taking a gander at the circumstance, concealing the finding from Jeff shields him from despondency or suicide. Is suicide essentially against Jeff best advantage? Is it right to say that it was best for the specialist to give him painkillers knowing the gravity of the circumstance? Wouldn't you say the patient has the right to know the truth to empower how to spend his last days?

I submit with the same question in mind, do doctors know what is in the best interest of the patient?

The most focal ethical issue, in this case, is between autonomy and paternalism. As indicated by the standards of autonomy, every reasonable individual is assumed capable and equipped for making his own decisions if given adequate information and every medical officer has the obligation to make that medical information easily accessible to the patient. Therefore, each individual has the right to decide what is best in his own interest. Counterbalancing, with respect to paternalism, the doctor is believed to have the expert knowledge needed to decide in light of the interest of the individual.

From the beginning of western medicines, medical culture has stressed a paternalistic value system in which only doctors and not patients or third families are assumed fit for settling on their choices about what is best for a patient. At that point this paternalism is fortified by patients who like to give their doctors full autonomy to make all their health decisions; indeed at least part if doctors efficacy comes simply from patients confidence in doctor’s capacity to heal.

Lamentably, doctors’ tendency to settle on a choice for patients is in some cases supported by doctors' bigot, misogynist, or classist thoughts. Doctors are, however, presented to adopt the same stereotypical ideas about regarding monitories, ladies, and lower class people common in society. Doctors who hold such thoughts in some cases make decisions for patients having a place within these groups, rather than solving the patients in the decisions since they trust it is less demanding and less tedious.

Also, doctors’ tendency to make a decision for patients can be reinforced when social and cultural boundaries make it difficult for doctors to gain patients’ cooperation or to better understand patients’ conviction or wishes. Those social differences are apparently most prominent when western born doctors treat immigrants or foreigners from other societies. In this condition, even the smallest gestures inadvertently can create misunderstanding and malevolence.

More so, doctors only rarely have unlimited oversight over treatment choices and connection with the patient.

Let me leave you with something to think about then;

Do doctors have the obligation to tell their patients the truth at all times?

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