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Therapy Is About Having An Honest Relationship, But Is Lying Ever OK?

We’ve been having a great discussion over on the post Tell Me…. An Ethical Dilemma.  The post talks about a young man who wants to know if he can check “no” to a question about whether he has a psychiatric disorder if his illness is not relevant to the situation.  The comments have been fascinating — do read them– and very thought-provoking.

One reader asked, ” If a patient asked if they were boring you, and they were, would you say yes?”

This is a great question, and of course the right thing to do is to explore with the patient what meaning the concern has to him.  But is that all?  I’m not very good at doing the old psychoanalyst thing of deflecting all questions, and mostly I do answer questions when they are asked of me.  This can present a really sticky situation because one can not think of any clinical scenario in which it would be therapeutic to have a therapist tell a patient, ‘Yes, you’re boring, OMG are you boring,’ or ‘No, in fact, I don’t like you.’  And not answering could be viewed as negative response by the patient –if you liked me, you’d tell me, so clearly you don’t like me.  So if the exploration of the question doesn’t take care of the issue, and the patient continues to ask, what’s a shrink to do? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

A Young Person Refuses Life-Saving Treatment: Is That Ok?

In my Monday post, I posed a challenging real-life dilemma we recently faced in the ER. As always, I modified the posited case from the actual facts but the broad outlines were true to life: A young person of questionable capacity wants to refuse lifesaving treatment.

Short answer, for those not interested in the discussion: This case is a no-brainer. You intubate. In this case, sadly, the outcome was not good. As I hinted, early hypoxia in the setting of blunt chest trauma is a bad sign. The patient was intubated, but became progressively more difficult to ventilate over the next couple of days and subsequently died. The family was at the bedside and, from what I understand, they were very happy to be able to be with him in his final hours. On the other hand, due to his drug abuse, he proved extremely difficult to sedate (even on max propofol!) and was agitated and combative, in restraints, until hypoxia began to take its toll. While I am confident I did the “right” thing, the tally sheet is decidedly mixed as to whether was beneficent in its effect.

Discussion: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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