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  3. Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patient — to speed recovery or to conceal the approach of death? In medicine as in law,

Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patient — to speed recovery or to conceal the approach of death? In medicine as in law,

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问题     Should doctors ever lie to benefit their patient — to speed recovery or to conceal the approach of death? In medicine as in law, government, and other lines of work, the requirements of honesty often seem dwarfed by greater needs: the need to shelter from brutal news or to uphold a promise of secrecy; to expose corruption or to promote the public interest.
    What should doctors say, for example, to a 46-year-old man coming in for a routine physical checkup just before going on vacation with his family who, though he feels in perfect health, is found to have a form of cancer that will cause him to die within six months? Is it best to tell him the truth? If he asks, should the doctors deny that he is ill, or minimize the gravity of the illness? Should they at least conceal the truth until after the family vacation?
    Doctors confront such choices often and urgently. At times, they see important reasons to lie for the patient’s own sake; in their eyes, such lies differ sharply from self-serving ones.
    Studies show that most doctors sincerely believe that the seriously ill patients do not want to know the truth about their condition, and that informing them risks destroying their hope, so that they may recover more slowly, or deteriorate faster, perhaps even commit suicide. As one physician wrote: "Ours is a profession which traditionally has been guided by a precept that transcends the virtue of uttering the truth for truth’s sake, and that is ’as far as possible do no harm."
    But the illusory nature of the benefits is now coming to be documented. Studies show that, contrary to the belief of many physicians, an overwhelming majority of patients do want to be told the truth, even about grave illness, and feel betrayed when they learn that they have been misled. We are also learning that truthful information, humanely conveyed, helps patients cope with illness: help them tolerate pain better, need less medicine, and even recover faster after surgery.
    There is urgent need to debate this issue openly. Not only in medicine, but in other professions as well, practitioners may find themselves repeatedly in difficulty where serious consequences seem avoidable only through deception. Yet the public has every reason to be wary of professional deception, for such practices are peculiarly likely to become deeply rooted, to spread, and to erode trust. Neither in medicine, nor in law, government, or the social sciences can there be comfort in the old saying, " What you don’t know can’t hurt you."
According to the author’s opinion, lies______.
选项 A、can benefit the patients.
B、can help the patients to recovery
C、can do nothing to the patients’ illness
D、can not benefit the patients
答案D
解析 态度题。作者在文章的第五段，通过使用but，contrary to，majority of patients do want to be toldthe truth．truthful information helps patients cope with illness等文字清楚地表明了自己的观点“欺骗对病人没有好处”，相反，真实的信息有助于病人更好地抵抗病魔。由此可见D是正确答案。
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