Poll: Docs not always honest with patients

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Trust your doctor? A survey finds that some doctors aren’t always completely honest with their patients.

More than half admitted describing someone’s prognosis in a way they knew was too rosy.

Nearly 20 percent said they hadn’t fully disclosed a medical mistake for fear of being sued.

And 1 in 10 of those surveyed said they’d told a patient something that wasn’t true in the past year.

The survey, by Massachusetts researchers and published in this month’s Health Affairs, doesn’t explain why, or what wasn’t true.

“I don’t think that physicians set out to be dishonest,” said lead researcher Dr. Lisa Iezzoni, a Harvard Medical School professor and director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Mongan Institute for Health Policy. She said the untruths could have been to give people hope.

But it takes open communication for patients to make fully informed decisions about their health care, as opposed to the “doctor-knows-best” paternalism of medicine’s past, Iezzoni added.

The survey offers “a reason for patients to be vigilant and to be very clear with their physician about how much they do want to know,” she said.

The findings come from a 2009 survey of more than 1,800 physicians nationwide to see if they agree with and follow certain standards of medical professionalism issued in 2002.

Among the voluntary standards are that doctors should be open and honest about all aspects of patient care and promptly disclose any mistakes.

A third of those surveyed didn’t completely agree that doctors should ’fess up about mistakes.

That’s even though a growing number of medical centers are adopting policies that tell doctors to say “I’m sorry” up front, in part because studies have found patients less likely to sue when that happens.

Not revealing a mistake is “just inexcusable,” said Dr. Arthur Caplan, a prominent medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Beyond decency, “your care now has to be different because of what happened.”