Telling culturally construed truth in clinical practice

摘要

Your Editorial entitled "Truth telling in clinical practice" (Oct 1, p 1197)1 raises an old, albeit contentious, issue in medicine. Any caring physician knows how important it is to inform the patient about the diagnosis and prognosis of a disease, and the treatmertt options. Since culture creates the context within which individuals experience life, illness, suffering, and death, cultural and moral meanings of diseases profoundly affect clinical medicine. Thus the ethics of truth telling in medicine is embedded in cultural meaning and construction of what is understood as truth.