And would you suggest doctors would take two to three extra hours with every patient to work them through a basic statistics class which still isn't sufficient to explain the concept?
I think that this is an unworthy and authoritarian approach which only leads to distrust: How can that guy say that I will certainly survive when Wikipedia, Lymphoma.org and the fucking New England Journal of Medicine agree that there is a one in five chance of me biting the dust in the next few years?
If you think doctors don't have time for you for economic reasons, and not the fact that there are other patients out there, you really have no idea what doctors do all day.
> They argue like the author of the article did: That they know better than you how you will react to this kind of information, and that they can manage your morale by taking certain freedoms with the truth.
They have far more experience with people receiving this information than the person receiving it.
You are the one who explains that behavior with economic constraints - seemingly without even realizing it. I have written twice that I don't think it comes down to economic reasons.
> They have far more experience with people receiving this information than the person receiving it.
I think that's a popular misconception. They are highly specialized experts for certain kinds of cancer, not priests, social workers or psychologists. You do not have deep conversations with them about how you are coping with the disease and the possibility of dying. You discuss blood counts, treatment plans, possibly options for being recruited into a study population. Or more concisely: They maintain a professional relationship while keeping a healthy emotional distance from their patients.
And nobody should blame them for that. After all, you go to the doctor to get treatment for your cancer, not a shoulder to cry on.
"A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." (emphasis mine)
He then told that questions like "should we tell the patient that he has two years left, and watch him and his family live the life of constant worry and sadness (and probably of a therapy that will add a year or so to the total lifespan, at the cost of being painful for the patient and very taxing to the family), or should we omit that information and let him live his life out in peace and happiness?" are part of an on-going ethical debate in medicine - because of the need to balance the "mental well-being" part with the "absence of disease".
Also, while telling the truth is a virtue, doing so knowing that people had, and will, predictably hurt themselves with it seems less so.
Maybe the issue discussed here is with the doctor entirely - what they think of themselves when seeing a patient respond to their expert opinion. So the patient cries, or panicks, or leaves their family? That is nothing to the doctor; not their business nor responsibility.
Its not irresponsible for the doctor to tell the facts, no matter how they lead. Because the impact on the patient is not their responsibility at all. Trying to make it so is wrong and selfish and manipulative.
That directly conflicts with the WHO definition of health. Which is exactly my point. Doctors nowdays are responsible for more than just the physical well-being, and they try to figure out how to handle these additional responsibilities in an optimal way.