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Medical Information Issue

The purpose of this research is to examine the issues surrounding what and how much information a doctor (Updyke) should reveal to a patient (Mrs. Pericolo, age 64) and her grown children when the children insist, based on what they say is their intimate knowledge of the patient, that a negative prognosis should be concealed from the patient. The plan of the research will be to set forth the conceptual context for the sharing or concealment of medical information and then to discuss what the doctor should tell the patient's family as well as what the doctor should tell the patient.

The issue of whether to reveal to a terminally ill or potentially terminally ill the exact nature of a prognosis is a matter of controversy not only in the medical community but also in the wider society. Among the most bleak judgments of the whole area of what could be called the social aspects of life and death is offered by Bauman, who says (20) that the promises of high-tech medicine have so overtaken popular imagination that the culture as a whole has not the ability to respond to the direct experience of death--whether that of themselves or their loved ones. In this view, it would make sense for the doctor to conceal a negative prognosis from everyone and hold out false hope of recovery, based on the heroic intervention of technology in Mrs. Pericolo's possible malignant abdominal cancer.

But of course such a simplistic answer would be entirely unsatisfactory to both patient and her children. For the reason that the children appear to have intervened in the information-transmission process of Mrs. Pericolo's case, Dr. Updyke appears to be obliged to deal with them regarding her prognosis before dealing directly with the patient. The first thing that Updyke should explain to the children is that her first obligation is to the patient. This is consistent with the traditions of the Hippocratic Oath, which above all is an injunction to patient advoca...

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Medical Information Issue. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:48, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1712013.html