In the state of Massachusetts is it legal for a doctor to give a patient an approximate time of life left? I am referring to a woman who is in Stage 4 cancer and can no longer tolerate chemotherapy.
This is a woman I know online, and I am beginning to notice discrepancies in her stories.
just wondering, so in a jurisdiction where that may be illegal, what are patients supposed to do to find out such a prognosis? Send their dossier to a doctor elsewhere?
How can the mere act of communication (short of communicating as part of a conspiracy, or being in the nature of a threat, etc.) ever be illegal for anyone, anywhere in the US? Moreover, in the specific instance of a doctor and a patient, is not their communication privileged (private between them and not subject to disclosure)? IANAL, but the notion of barring a private communication between two people, when no threats are uttered, and no conspiracy plotted, seems inconceivable.
Phrased differently, someone is BS’ing you.
Have I misinterpreted your question?
It doesn’t have to be a criminal act; there may be contractual restrictions involved. Otherwise why didn’t half the Apple employees sell the scoop to various tabloids prior to the announcement?
This is unlikely to be the case in a medical scenario, however. Just that there are plenty of times where you can’t communicate information.
Why wouldn’t it be legal? You hear of doctors doing this all the time…telling patients that with their illness at that stage, the average person lasts x number of months or years. It seems to be a practical thing, to inform people of their prognosis so they can make informed decisions about how to spend their time. Some people beat the odds, some people die quicker, sometimes the doctor is wrong, sometimes a new treatment comes along just in time…it seem far better to have an idea of what the average life expectancy is for someone with your condition and treatment options, than to not know.
I’ve heard of cases where the whole family would conspire not to tell Mom that she had cancer and would likely die, just so she wouldn’t get scared and depressed. She must really have been wondering what they were treating her for in those cases!I’d personally rather know than be surprised by my own death.
Is THAT legal?
I believe we had a Pit thread on that, where the OP was pissed because the doctor went and informed his mother that she had had a stroke. (Although in this case it wasn’t fatal).
In some cases, a doctor may even be -required- to give an estimate of ‘time left’, such as for determining if someone is eligible for hospice care, for example. So I doubt it’s illegal to make that determination, always with the proviso that it’s an estimate and not a guarantee.
It’s actually quite common in China. Frequently, the doctors will communicate the reality of the situation of the family and leave it up to the family to choose whether or not to tell the patient.
Thank you all for contributing. KarlGauss you have correctly interpreted my question, and this along with other discrepancies in her stories have put me on whoosh alert.
This was where I first heard of it…in a story about a Chinese family who refused to tell the mother she was gravely ill.
This is in the UK, but since we’re talking about other countries now. When my dad was in the last stages of his brain tumour and didn’t understand anything much we were approached by a senior nurse on the ward. She told us that she was duty bound to inform him of his prognosis, and was letting us know that she was going to do so, asking us if we wanted to do it instead. At that point we all knew it would mean absolutely nothing to him, but she said nonetheless her duty of care was to him as an adult to treat him as if he were able to be informed. I always had the impression this was an absolute rule (although thinking about it now, I’m not sure that it is) - so entirely the opposite of the OP. Regardless, I thought it was a very decent thing - they continued to treat him as a functioning adult capable of understanding his situation, not as a shell which he pretty much was by then. It made a horrific time just a little bit easier.
Charley- where a patient has indicated that they wish to be kept informed of their prognosis if you have any belief that they may still be in a position to understand, you do indeed have a duty to inform them.
Doctors now are told when breaking bad news or discussing prognosis to ask the patient “how much do you know?” and “how much would you like to know?”.
Obviously, it is the patient’s prerogative to say “I don’t want to know my diagnosis or prognosis- and you can’t tell my family either” but the number of times this actually happens is vanishingly small.
A doctor could conceivably say “I can’t give you an exact prognosis” but would usually talk about days vs weeks or months.