Honesty in Medicine

Incidental Economist is another great blog I wholeheartedly recommend.  Aaron Carroll calls attention to a study of physician attitudes towards honesty.  The punchline, emphasis mine:

They[sic] survey also asked specifically about things subjects had actually done in the last year. That’s where it gets even more depressing. More than 10% of docs had told an adult patient or guardian something that wasn’t true. Almost 20% had – in the last year – not fully disclosed a mistake because they were afraid of being sued. And more than a quarter of physicians had revealed, either intentionally or unintentionally, personal health information of one of their patients to an unauthorized person.

Bear in mind those are physicians voluntarily self-identifying their behavior, in the wild it's probably even more common.  I've said it before, but doctors really are not angels.