Myanmar clinicians' preference of truth telling about cancer diagnosis

Bioethics for clinicians: 7. Truth telling.

The standard of professional candour with patients has undergone a significant change over the past 30 years. Independent of their obligation to disclose information necessary for informed consent, physicians are increasingly expected to communicate important information to patients that is not immediately related to treatment decisions. The purpose of truth telling is not simply to enable pati...

Telling the Truth about Medical Malpractice

This analysis challenges the medical malpractice findings of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Commission”) in its December 2010 report “The Moment of Truth.” Specifically, we reject its assertion in section 3.3.12 that taking away the legal rights of injured patients would “save $2 billion in 2015, $17 billion through 2020.” We find that the Commission’s proposal wo...

Truth-telling and the diagnosis of dementia.

Thinking with Foucault about Truth-Telling and The Daily Show

This essay brings together two practitioners of critical irony, Michel Foucault and Jon Stewart, to examine problems in the standard critiques of the impact of irony on cultural discourse. For years, critics have bemoaned the increased use of irony in culture, arguing that too much irony in public discourse leads to the formation of distant and disengaged subjects. Using Foucault’s work on parr...

Telling Truth from Correlation

This work is motivated by a question at the heart of unsupervised learning approaches: Assume we are collecting a number K of (subjective) opinions about some event E from K different agents. Can we infer E from them? Prima facie this seems impossible, since the agents may be lying. We model this task by letting the events be distributed according to some distribution p and the task is to estim...