Refusals of psychotropic medication by detained criminal defendants raise conflicting dual loyalties for psychiatrists between the duty to treat a patient and the duty to protect society from that patient.
Physicians can ethically withhold information in situations where full disclosure of a diagnosis or treatment would cause great psychological harm to the patient.
Physicians need to understand when it may be appropriate to let patients get involved in medical decision-making and when it may be necessary to provide their personal medical judgment.
An ethical case explores whether a medical student doing a radiology rotation has a duty to inform a patient whose chest x-ray shows bony metastases that was not caught by the original radiologist or mentioned in the ED chart.