ABSTRACT
In order to make decisions about their treatment, patients need to know the full picture, and this means being given any information that others have about them. Lying to patients, or deliberately misleading them, prevents them from being able to control their own lives. Health care also involves duties of fidelity and promise-keeping, which involve honest and open communication. A Kantian duty-based theorist would say that it is always necessary to tell the truth, even if this would have disastrous consequences, and that moral agents have an absolute duty to be honest, even if this leads to disastrous consequences. Practitioners, along with the rest of society, tend not to share this categoric point of view.
