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Andrea Villari

Mr. Svolos

Bioethics

September 22 2014

Should Doctors Lie?

When becoming a doctor, you are forced to agree to a document known as the Hippocratic Oath. This oath states the moral obligation of doctors and what is expected of them. Personally I believe that although doctors have a moral responsibility of what is asked of them, that in some cases lying would be acceptable.

For instance, while watching House M.D we saw in three episodes a question of morality of House and the other doctors when it came to letting the patient aware of certain information. In the episode entitled ‘Sleeping Dog’s Lie’, were introduced to a couple, one of which needing a liver transplant. House and the other doctors are informed of a matter that one party of the relationship isn’t aware of and it’s questioned whether or not that they should be informed before the surgery. When it comes to a patients personal life, I do not believe that the doctor has the right to expose information that isn’t medically related so in which lying about knowing very well saved the patients life in the long run.

Just last January there was a case where a Jamaican 22 year old entered the hospital with heart failure. The father, begged the doctor to simply go into the room and let his son know that he’d be alright even if the odds were far against him. The patient had been laying on the bed, hysterical and in a lot of pain. The doctor did lie, which I agree with. As the days went on, the doctors eased the news onto him which I believe was a much easier approach than to simply tell him flat out that the chances of him dying were larger than none. Even in the sense of the story that we viewed in the YouTube video, of the man who needed the stress test, which was a test of three thousand dollars out of pocket to the patient since his insurance didn’t cover it. With a few check marks of the patients symptoms, the patient would then be covered for the test through their insurance company which...