- 著者
-
尾久 裕紀
- 出版者
- 日本医学哲学・倫理学会
- 雑誌
- 医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.15, pp.64-71, 1997-09-20 (Released:2018-02-01)
Ethical principales of medicine for physicians provide that a physician must have empathy with and respect for the "dignity of man". For example, the complete works of Hippocrates contain the following passage, "A physician must be impartial in his personal relations". This means that a physician needs to get along with the other persons even when there is a conflict of desires with them. Does a physician always deal with patients impartially in actual clinical practice? It is out of the question, if there is evidently a lack of fairness. But there are cases in which a physician lacks true fairness depending on the nuance of his words, although he appears to be fair formally. In this case there are several causes. In the presentation this time, we examine lack of fairness due to a physician feeling "disagreeable" toward a patient. Feeling "disagreeable" toward a patient may be devided into those cases when the physician himself is aware of it and those where he is not aware of it. For a physician to feel "disagreeable" toward a patient may be unavoidable since the patient-physician relation is a personal relation. In any case, this feeling is one of the causes for a physician to lack fairness to patients. For example, when a physician discloses medical information to a patint to whom he feels "disagreeable", the true meaning sometimes is not understood, or a distorted version is relayed to the patient intentionally or non-intentionally, even if the substance of disclosure is enough formally (or legally). Even when the same information is told in the same words, the way of relaying it and nuance can be changed by the "disagreeable feeling" toward the patient, and the inforlmation is understood quite differently by the patient. In this presentation, we study what situation also cause a physician to find a patient to be a "disagreeable person", whether it is against the ethics of medicine for a physician to feel "disagreeable" toward a patient and how a physician should deal with a patient impartially even when he thinks that patient to be a "disagreeable person".