We're you there?
Lying to your patient and providing placebo treatments which make him look like a fool is ethical and accepted?
Notice I said make him look like a fool or humiliate him...yes, placebos are used in science and medicine but where is the need in this situation?
Wouldn't professional behavior and a more thorough understanding of potential underlying conditions been warranted in this situation? How about lessening their anxiety by talking to them, educating them on their condition as opposed to silly gimmicks which do nothing but humiliate or patronize the patient and make the providers look like arses when they roll into the ER with a silly smirk on their face seeking approval for their silly antic.
It is a gross display of unprofessional behavior and yes it does continue to perpetuate the stereotype of us in general amongst our other medical colleagues/professionals that we are idiots.
In certain situations..yeah.
If you had a psych pt who was having an anxiety induced asthma attack and wouldn't put a mask on because he was afraid of it stealing his thoughts, and you took out your pen and wrote "thought protector" on a mask and told him it was a special device to actually stop people stealing his thoughts...I'd do that. But its still technically lying, and using a partly psychosomatic approach to calm him down by "protecting his thoughts", and sure look like an idiot being wheeled into ED with a thought protector on his face. But it would work.
Maybe a similar situation ethically. We really don't know how reasonable and rational the guy was, maybe he was going absolutely nuts and they thought it was the quickest and easiest way to calm him down so he wouldn't hurt himself, we weren't there. So I don't necessarily want to write of the medic's actions without knowing more. My comment was not specifically about them, but about the ethics of that sort of action in general. Maybe it was the wrong course of action in that situation (like I said we can't really know unless we were there), but not inherently wrong in and of itself.
Plenty of doctors are immature, make jokes at pts expense, probably even tape the occasional asprin to a forehead or two, everyone still think they are professionals. I guarantee you, if all medics were required to have masters degrees, you could act the goat as much as you liked and people would still think you were pros. You've got bigger fish to fry, mate.
And how did you arrive at this determination? Just because the drove him to the ER doesn't mean that they thought something could be going on with the patient. It seems pretty apparent by there actions that they believed the entire run was total BS. Why else would they lie to their patient and trick him into allowing ridiculous "treatments" to be administered.
Why would you take them to the ED otherwise? Unless they were adamant to go themselves. I spose you might have some stupid protocol over there that says all pts go to ED or something...sigh. Anyway, as I said above, we don't know anything else about what they did to treat the guy. Maybe they monitored him, took vitals assessed, took Hx, we don't really know. Or maybe he rings them every few days having anxiety attacks and he's a little slow, and they know him and this is the best way to calm him down. Just because part of the story was
told as a humorous anecdote (
the OP may have misunderstood their intentions and because he thought they were humiliating him, he told the story that way...who knows) doesn't mean they didn't take it relatively seriously. I realise that it's quite probably that there was a malicious element to their behaviour, but you really can't hang, draw and quarter a medics level of professionalism based on an anecdote about their practice told by a student who observed them (and may have misunderstood intentions etc) for a day.
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