On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:28:59 +0100 JP Freriks <jpfreriks at gmail.com> wrote:
> But in general: are there situations thinkable where a health > professional doesn't want to disclose her/his comments to the patient? I am a haematologist/oncologist. Disclosure of sensitive information is eternal problem for us. Even a skilled and experienced doctor feels dubious whether/how inform the 'fact'. Moreover, psycological medicine includes more sensitive infomation about disclosure. Careless disclosure worses disease conditions. I experienced to know patient's secret incidentally. I ordered a patient's family HLA typing for bone marrow transplantation. The HLA data indicated that he is related by blood with his mother, but not related with his father. In this case, we discussed whether inform or not and only told he did not have matched doner in his family. In genomic study, similar cases are reported. A disease susceptibility gene analysis indicates more disease infomation incidentally now and in the future because gene profiling is updated frequently. Whether we must notice all such incidental infomation is now discussed and never get the conclusion. We sometimes notice some troubling persons' information for the staffs but we do not want to inform our provision. This type information is categorised in private note, but I think it should be shared among healthcare prividers. For example, "YAKUZA(Japanese mafia)", "Drug addiction", "Unpaid", "Claimer", " -- KOBAYASHI, Shinji <skoba at moss.gr.jp>
