Truth Telling Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Truth Telling - Essay Example There are a number of disciplines that do not encourage lying. Such a discipline as medicine and its related subsets require truthful interaction between doctors and patients in order to achieve the effectiveness of both the diagnosis and treatment. Honesty is a relative concept in the health care ethics. For a long time, medical practitioners had assumed that patients told the truth about their conditions but as studies later proved, the effectiveness of a diagnosis relies on the amount of information that both parties in the process give each other thereby prompting the encouragement of truth from both the doctor and the patient. Just as doctors require as much accurate information from their patients in order to make factual diagnosis, patients also need to know their conditions thereby prompting the doctors to tell their patients the truth. Additionally, some professions within the practice of medicine rely entirely on dialogues between patients and doctors. Such therapeutic prac tices as psychoanalysis thus rely on the truthful interaction between the two in order to develop effective treatment plans. Truth telling in the practice also includes the process of reporting errors. During the practice, doctors are likely just as any other human to make errors. The factuality with which they report such help develops an effective address mechanism thereby preventing or minimizing harm. Most patients sue the organizations in such cases, a truthful account of the error to both the management and the concerned party aids faster mitigation of the errors thereby giving them an opportunity to develop an understanding. Besides the professional obligations in the practice of medicine, a number of reasons validate truth telling some of which include the fact that lying is an inherent wrong. Lying is a social vise that everyone detests. People may therefore lie depending on the relativity of the scenarios but they all consider lying as a social evil, which they therefore d iscourage. Parents strive to develop honesty personalities in their children. Such develop cohesive families in which the members do not hurt one another. Collective responsibility to uphold honesty in people results in the development of an ideal society in which people do not withhold the truth from others. Honesty is relative and infers diverse meanings all of which begin from truth telling1. This way, the society thus becomes one with minimal evil. Patients on the other hand entrust their lives on the professionalism in their doctors. They thus do not expect the doctors to lie to them. Owing to this, patients tell their doctors truths about their conditions and expect their doctors to do the same from the doctors. Acting indifferently by lying in such an essential communication process breaks the trust of either party, thereby impairing the effectiveness of the process. Additionally, lying creates a barrier between patients and their doctors. The diagnosis relies on the factuali ty of the communication process between the two. By each party lying to the other thus hampers the effectiveness of the diagnosis thereby impairing the treatment. Doctors for example are always in charge of the conversation. They therefore need to create an enabling environment for their patients to offer as much information with them about their condition as possible. They can only achieve this by appearing honest with