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

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

admin2010-02-26  46
问题     Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patients – 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 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 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 prognosis? 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 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 troth’s sake, and that is ’as far as possible do no harm’ ."
    Armed with such a precept, a number of doctors may slip into deceptive practices that they assume will "do no harm" and may well help their patients. They may prescribe innumerable placebos, sound more encouraging than the facts warrant, and distort grave news, especially to the incurably iii and the dying.
    But the illusory nature of the benefits such deception is meant to bestow 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: helps them tolerate pain better, need less medication, and even recover faster after surgery.
    Not only do lies not provide the "help" hoped for by advocates of benevolent deception: they invade the autonomy of patients and make them unable to decide on informed choices concerning their health.
Doctors sometimes choose to lie because they think ______.
选项 A、they have the right of secrecy
B、they lie just for the patient’ s sake, not for self-serving ones
C、they like to lie
D、they want to know how the patient reply after such lies
答案B
解析 要点理解题。本题答案可在第三段中得出。
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