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  3. Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patient — to speed recovery or to conceal the approach of death? In medicine as in law,

Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patient — to speed recovery or to conceal the approach of death? In medicine as in law,

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问题     Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patient — to speed recovery or to conceal the approach of death? In medicine as in law, government, and other lines of work, the requirements of honesty often seem dwarfed by greater needs: the need to shelter from brutal news or to uphold a promise of secrecy; to expose corruption or to promote the public interest.
    What should doctors say, for example, to a 46-year-old man coming in for a routine physical checkup just before going on vacation with his family who, though he feels in perfect health, is found to have a form of cancer that will cause him to die within six months? Is it best to tell him the truth? If he asks, should the doctors deny that he is ill, or minimize the gravity of the illness? Should they at least conceal the truth until after the family vacation?
    Doctors confront such choices often and urgently. At times, they see important reasons to lie for the patient’s own sake; in their eyes, such lies differ sharply from self-serving ones.
    Studies show that most doctors sincerely believe that the seriously ill patients do not want to know the truth about their condition, and that informing them risks destroying their hope, so that they may recover more slowly, or deteriorate faster, perhaps even commit suicide. As one physician wrote: "Ours is a profession which traditionally has been guided by a precept that transcends the virtue of uttering the truth for truth’s sake, and that is ’as far as possible do no harm."
    But the illusory nature of the benefits is now coming to be documented. Studies show that, contrary to the belief of many physicians, an overwhelming majority of patients do want to be told the truth, even about grave illness, and feel betrayed when they learn that they have been misled. We are also learning that truthful information, humanely conveyed, helps patients cope with illness: help them tolerate pain better, need less medicine, and even recover faster after surgery.
    There is urgent need to debate this issue openly. Not only in medicine, but in other professions as well, practitioners may find themselves repeatedly in difficulty where serious consequences seem avoidable only through deception. Yet the public has every reason to be wary of professional deception, for such practices are peculiarly likely to become deeply rooted, to spread, and to erode trust. Neither in medicine, nor in law, government, or the social sciences can there be comfort in the old saying, " What you don’t know can’t hurt you."
What does the author mainly discuss in the passage?
选项 A、Deception is beneficial to patients.
B、Whether patients should be told the truth of their illness.
C、Whether patients really want to know the truth of their illness.
D、Who benefits from deception.
答案B
解析 主旨归纳题。通读全文可知，作者针对医生对病人隐瞒病情这一做法提出质疑：病人应不应该了解真相?了解真相对他们有没有好处?
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