SHOULD DOCTORS TELL?

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 26 November 1927, Page 14

SHOULD DOCTORS TELL?

BEDSIDE MANNER HINTS, t London. Oct. 28. Sir Humphry Rolleston, regius professor of physics at Cambridge University and physician-in-ordinary to the King, addressing students at the opening of the winter season at St. George s Hospital, London, explained that it was not always wise to tell a patient the worst about hie or her case. He also explained how a perfect bedside manner could be acquired by a doctor. Sir Humphry said: “Honesty and truth are essential, but what may at the time seem the whole truth should not always, in the lioht of human fallibility, be communicated to the patient. A death sentence given bluntly on what may prove to have been insufficient grounds benefits neither the patient nor the doctor.” Sir Humphry declared that a doctor’s dictum was not forgotten gasily by his audience, and so, though often pressed for a premature opinion, it was wise to refrain from speculative prophecy—of all mistakes the most gratuitous. On the subject of the perfect bedside manner Sir Humphry said it was the result of so getting inside the patients’ minds a sto think their thoughts, feel their feelings, and thus understand their mentality and anxieties so thoroughly that the medical man was obviously their friend, with their interests so entirely at heart that nothing else counted.