Abstract
When compassion and the Hippocratic Oath pull Dr. Smith in different directions, Dr. Smith finds a compromise. Dr. Smith acts as the arbiter in bargaining. Knowing this, a patient can take any of three steps to influence the physician’s decision: (1) reduce dependency on the physician by gaining access to palliative care; (2) find a physician who has a lot of compassion for patients; and (3) go with an experienced general practitioner, rather than a specialist.
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This chapter is largely based on Lee (2008).
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Notes
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Hamermesh and Soss (1974) explain suicide by a declining utility.
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This explains why the physician does not have the incentive to be totally forthright with the patient about prognosis. Christakis (1999) has observed that physicians, when confronting dying patients, do not like to prognosticate. This is consistent with the finding that, when provided prognostic information from a state-of-the-art statistical model, most physicians simply ignore it (SUPPORT 1995).
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Lee, L.W. (2018). The Two-Headed Physician. In: Behavioral Economics and Bioethics. Palgrave Advances in Behavioral Economics. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89779-0_5
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