Doctors face such choices often. At times, they see important reasons to lie for the patients’ own sake. Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patients---to speed recovery or to cover the coming of death?
• Not only in medicine, but in other professions such as law and government as well, practitioners(从 业 者 ) may find themselves repeatedly in the dilemma(困境) of choosing between telling the true information and covering it up. Therefore, there is an urgent need to debate this issue openly. Otherwise, people in our society will be blindly comfortable in the old saying, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
• 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 of risks destroys their hope, so that they may recover more slowly, or deteriorate(恶化)faster, perhaps even commit suicide.