Doctors and Religious Sensitivity

Doctors, according to informed consent and general medical practice, have an obligation to tell patients what all their options are. It’s the role of the patient to decide accordingly. The movement for informed consent in medicine grew out of the 60s and 70s, an era when doctors’ paternalism left limited or no choice to the patient about what treatments they were willing to undergo. Women particularly led the charge to take control over their medical decisions; they were horrified by stories from women who were scheduled for biopsies and came out of anesthesia will full mastectomies, no questions asked, no options given. But medical paternalism will only be eliminated when doctors are required to fully inform patients of what their options are, without bias, without profiling, without assumption. If the movement for religious sensitivity training were to rather focus on a more robust version of today’s informed consent, I would be all for it. But simply pushing doctors to tailor information according to their understanding of their patient’s beliefs is a recipe for less information, not more.