Physicians can ethically withhold information in situations where full disclosure of a diagnosis or treatment would cause great psychological harm to the patient.
A bioethicist who had thyroid cancer as a child describes his recent positive experience as an adult patient with his surgeon and how his surgeon's bioethics training helped the patient-physician relationship.
An attending physician in an urban teaching hospital faces an ethical dilemma when a mother refused to allow an African American medical student to examine her child.