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Honesty Best Patient Policy
Physicians' primary obligations are to their patients, without a doubt.
They have other obligations, of course, including to wider society, to
their professional colleagues, both physicians and other health care
professionals, to their employing institutions, and to their own ethical
codes (which may or may not accord completely with their personal
religious convictions.) We know that many physicians have strong moral
objections to carrying out certain procedures for religious reasons- e.g.
Catholics and abortion. But they must tell their patients that that is
the case, and be honest with them. And they must advise them to go elsewhere
if the patients hold other and differing religious views. To pretend
that physicians' own religious views trump those of their patients or wider
society is both arrogant and wrong-headed.
By
Julia Neuberger
|
August 10, 2007; 8:15 AM ET
| Category:
Morality
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Posted by: Alyssa Prince | December 21, 2007 10:21 PM
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Posted by: Cathleen David | December 15, 2007 9:04 PM
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Posted by: Cleveland Munoz | December 15, 2007 9:04 PM
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Honesty is not just the best policy, it's the only policy.
Informed consent is the law of the land.
If you can't abide by that, don't call yourself a doctor.
Period.
Posted by: Paganplace | August 11, 2007 6:25 PM
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In today's United States, there is a majority of Supreme Court justices who are determined to take away the choices that we heretofore have enjoyed under the law. These worthies, and the fundamentalist ranks from which they spring, are intent not only to cast away the advice of such as Mme. Baroness but extirpate it from United States law and banish it in silence forever from public discourse. This will be much easier for them when the "unitary executive" being cooked up by Dick Cheney comes into being. No checks and balances, no due process, no dissent, no recourse, resistance futile, a corporatist-militarist-imperial order, disciplined and neat, everything "decided" by the "decider" in circumstances of perpetual emergency, perpetual war, perpetual pressure to silence critics lest "terrorists" gain the advantage. Physicians, as well as others in BushWorld, must do their duty to the theocratic-dominionist doctrine: "Dogma First, Patients Next, Doctors Serve the State and Faith."
Posted by: almaden | August 10, 2007 9:31 PM
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I'm diverging from my usual abhorrence of repeated comments, but this was my reaction to many of the answers to this question.
There is more to this question than abortion, and even then it is a completely different proposition depending on where you live.
Those of us who are writing from large cities where there is an abundance of choices in medical care can talk about referring patients to different professionals. In some places, whether because they are rural or deeply steeped in a single religious ethos, those choices do not exist.
Posted by: Viejita del oeste | August 10, 2007 5:06 PM
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That pretty much sums it up. Didn't take a lot of words to do it, either.
Posted by: Godfrey | August 9, 2007 11:24 PM
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