Please don’t easily deprive parents of their right to know by Liu Jie, Department of Oncology, Guang’anmen Hospital, Chinese Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine Posted by: Lin Hongsheng (2012-03-25 08:09:11)Reprinted from Prof. Lin Hongsheng’s blog post Everyone has different attitudes when facing having cancer, but the moment of knowing, undoubtedly will be associated with death at the first time. During the outpatient clinic visits, I have been used to seeing family members who hide their illness from the patients. I understand them very well, they love and care for their loved ones and are afraid that they will lose their confidence in life because of the fear of having a tumor. The clinic scene a week ago made me question this practice: In came a young man with a boyish face, and guarding behind him was a teenage schoolgirl. “Doctor, my father has lung cancer, and we are afraid he can’t bear it, so we didn’t tell him. We came to you because we want you to prescribe some Chinese medicine for him, and we hope you will also keep it a secret for us.” I flipped through the medical records, the first page was written as fifty-year-old male, high school education, the diagnosis was left upper lung squamous carcinoma, mediastinal lymph node metastasis, other indicators are normal. I called the patient, a middle-aged, thin male, in good health and very responsive, he pulled out the consultation chair and quickly sat down with a puzzled face and said “I have inflammation in my lungs, I don’t know why my children brought me to Beijing to see it, doctor, is it serious? Can you tell me exactly what disease I have ……” I was speechless, and at the moment of my hesitation, the children had already pushed the father out the door. “How old are you?” I asked the boy, “Twenty this year.” “And you?” I asked the girl behind him, and without asking, I knew it was his sister by the look of her face, “Seventeen.” The girl answered while going to tug on her brother’s coat. “Why didn’t you tell father? Did you tell mother? Who’s in charge of the next treatment?” “Of course I’m in charge.” The boy faced me with that determination that encompassed all responsibility, “I couldn’t tell Dad, I was afraid he wouldn’t be able to handle it because the doctor had already told me he had metastasis. I can’t tell mom either, she’ll just cry if she finds out. I want them to just eat herbal medicine, so it won’t be painful ……” the child rattled on about his intentions, it was really hard for him, a child who was just entering adulthood. I analyzed his condition in detail, talked about the positive and negative effects of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and herbal treatment, and advised him to take a combination of Chinese and Western medicine. Finally I said to him, “Son, your parents are young, they have the right to choose their own treatment, they know how to accept the disease psychologically, they still have a lot to discuss with you, they may have more social experience than you and know how to choose the treatment, tell them the real situation!” The child nodded and went inside, I thought maybe he would listen to me. This is the third case I have seen this year where the child has taken on all the responsibility for treatment in his early twenties and the parents, who are in their fifties, should be uninformed and unable to choose their own treatment and other things to do. I actually disagree with this approach. If the parents were over seventy, in poor health, and uneducated, perhaps they could consider not knowing. But in today’s society, everyone should have the right to know about their disease and the right to choose their treatment. Moreover, tumor has been listed as a chronic disease, which means it has a lot of time to choose different treatments, so isn’t it really somehow regrettable to let a fifty-year-old patient be uninformed? The children’s good intentions are understandable, and their courageous style is commendable, but you have underestimated your parents, who are a generation of people who have gone through trials and tribulations, and who know how to handle everything about themselves, perhaps because they have entered the aging population earlier than them to be able to appreciate this generation more.