Limiting Patient and Doctor Confidentiality

Paper Summary:

This paper argues that, while patient and doctor confidentiality is an important medical ethic that serves an important function in increasing patients' trust in health care, it still must have limitations imposed upon it out of consideration for the issues of public health, such as when a doctor is treating a patient with a highly contagious disease.

From the Paper:

"The principle of patients' rights to privacy, or the ethical basis of patient and doctor confidentiality, has recently come under increasing threat. This principle states that a patient's medical records, including any conversations he might have had with his doctor, are confidential and private and regarded as so by the law. The defenders of this ethical and medical principle, such as Dodeck and Dodeck, authors of "From Hippocrates to Facsimile," argue that this principle is as old as medicine itself and is a "fundamental ethical principle since the Hippocratic Oath." More importantly, supporters of patient privacy rights argue that patient and doctor confidentiality is the basis upon which the medical practice is built (Dodeck and Dodeck). There is little doubt that this argument is partly right. The knowledge that whatever patients may reveal to their doctors is confidential, encourages patients to visit and confide in doctors. Naturally, this improves health care in society. However, others such as Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, an employee in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, contend that there are cases in which the consideration of whether society will benefit from, or be harmed by, the principle of privacy must be considered as a basis for violating privacy. While one may understand the importance of the principle of patient and doctor confidentiality and the positive contributions that it has made to the healthcare in societies, the fact is that the modern world is confronted by many deadly and easily spreading diseases such as AIDs or Ebola, making it important to redefine the concept of patient and doctor confidentiality as only applying in cases where there is no threat to public health or the life of another person. The Hippocratic Oath should not, and must not be used to protect the privacy of patients with deadly contagious diseases, allowing them to pose as a threat to the health and well-being of others, or the confidentiality of patients with criminal intents towards others and, therefore, needs to be redefine to permit doctors to report such cases to the proper health authorities thus, enabling doctors to fulfill their responsibilities towards their society."

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