Ethical problems abound at medical school, study claims!

Your doctor would let you know if he’d found cancer during a routine screening, wouldn’t he? Maybe not, according to a new study.

Medical students from the University of Toronto were asked about the types of ethical quandaries they had dealt with and almost two-thirds of them reported seeing one of their teachers behaving unethically, says this article from ABC News. Almost half of the med students said they felt pressure to behave unethically when they were treating patients, the article adds.

Some of the situations described in the article included not telling a patient he had lung cancer because the doctors were unsure about the type of cancer, and using patients as teaching tools after a diagnosis had been made and treatment was given. The students said they were also asked to do procedures on patients without assistance before they believed they were ready to do so.

“The results of this study are perturbing to say the least,” says one of the authors, Dave Robertson, who is a University of Toronto medical student himself.

But the public apparently isn’t perturbed. In fact, patients trust their doctors more than just about any other professional, says this BBC News article. Almost 90 percent of people polled said they trusted their doctors to tell them the truth.

Written by Serena Gordon, and published on DrKelley.info, April 3, 2001. Embedded links may no longer be active (Ed. 01.02.11)

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