When Is It Ok For Doctors To Write About Their Patients?
I can’t find it now, but on one of our posts somewhere MovieDoc has stated that doctors can never ethically write about their patients since they are incapable of giving truly informed consent. Besides the obvious “huh?’ response I have to the idea that patients aren’t capable of making decisions like this, I question the basic assumption that this should never happen.
The medical literature is replete with published anonymized case studies of patients with various maladies. For psychiatry in particular, early psychiatric classification was based on longitudinal descriptions of diseases. If it weren’t for the early case descriptions of Kaposi’s sarcoma in gay men published in the 1980’s, AIDS would not have been identified as a new disease. Case studies can and should be published to advance medical science. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
