Withholding Information from Cancer Patients as a Physician's Decision under Risk

Gideon Yaniv

Medical Decision Making, 2000, vol. 20, issue 2, 216-227

Abstract: When cancer is diagnosed, the physician may face a dilemma regarding disclosure of information to the patient. While he or she may feel a responsibility to maintain the patient's hope, even through the withholding of information, there is a risk involved: if treatment fails, the patient will eventually know the truth. Patients who would rather live their final days in peace rather than undergo unpleasant treatment of an uncertain nature may be furious and frustrated that they have been deprived of this liberty, ending their lives feeling worse than they would have had they been told the truth at the outset. The author applies three theories of decision making under uncertamty (expected utility theory, prospect theory, and regret theory) to the physician's problem of whether and to what extent to withhold information from a cancer patient, deriving comparative predictions with regard to the relationships between the physician's behavior and illness, patient, and physician characteristics. The results help explain why physicians whose norm of behavior is full disclosure sometimes opt to withhold information and why junior physicians are more likely to disclose the truth than their senior colleagues, as well as the empirical findings that physicians tend to disclose more truthful information to patients the greater the severity of illness and the more inquisitive the patient. Key words: cancer patient; information disclosure/withholding; risk/uncertamty; expected-utility theory; prospect theory; regret theory. (Med Decis Making 2000;20: 216-227)

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X0002000207 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:medema:v:20:y:2000:i:2:p:216-227

DOI: 10.1177/0272989X0002000207

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Medical Decision Making
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().