Inconvenient Truths
If doctors lie, it is surely inexcusable. One of the basic1 the public have of doctors is honesty. But what would you think if I told you that research has shown that 70 per cent of doctors 2 to lying to their patients? If I am honest, I have told lies to my patients.
Mrs Walton was in her eighties and3 to see her husband. She would try to get up to find him, despite being at risk of falling. "He's on his way, don't worry," the nurses would say this to calm her down. I said the same thing to her. But it was a lie. He died two years ago. The truth, if I can use that word, is that it is a4 to lie sometimes.
Mrs Walton is one of the dementia(痴呆) sufferers, who lose their short-term memory and the memory of5 events, but hold memories from the distant past. Sufferers are trapped forever in a confusing past that many realize bears little 6 to the present, but are at a loss to explain. Those with dementia often feel upset, scared and confused that they are in a strange place, 7 by strange people, even when they are in their own homes with their family, because they have gone back to decades ago.
They look at their adult children 8 and wonder who they could be because they think their children are still little kids. I have had countless families break down in tears, not knowing how to react as their loved one moves further away from them back into their distant past and they are 9 in the present. And how, as the doctor or nurse caring for these patients, does one manage the anger and outbursts of distress that comes with having no 10 of your life for the past ten or 20 years? The lies that doctors, nurses and families tell these patients are not big, elaborate lies — they are 11 comforts intended to calm and allow the subject to be swiftly changed.
12 with them about this false reality is not heartless or unprofessional — it is actually kind. That's not to say that lying to patients with dementia13 is right or defensible. But what kind-hearted person would put another human being through the unimaginable pain of learning,14 again and again, that they have lost their beloved ones. It would be an unthinkable cruelness.
Sometimes honesty is 15 not the best policy.
