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Impaired Physicians: What Should Patients Know?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Sissela Bok
Sissela Bok
Affiliation:
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
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Extract

What should patients know about the degree to which their physicians may be impaired—unable, in the words of the American Medical Association (A.M.A.), “to practice medicine with reasonable skill and safety to patients by reason of physical or mental illness, including alcoholism and drug dependence”? What patients do in fact find out about such matters as alcohol or other drug abuse by, say, the surgeon or the anesthesiologist in charge of their care is another matter altogether; most patients learn about such impairment the hard way. But what should they know beforehand, if at all possible?

Type
Article
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , Summer 1993 , pp. 331 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

Notes

1. Council on Mental Health of A.M.A. The sick physician: impairment by psychiatric disorders including alcoholism and drug dependence. Journal of the American Medical Association 1973;223:684–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

2. See, for example, Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. Ethical issues involved in the growing AIDS crisis. Journal of the American Medical Association 1988;259:1360–1.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed For a discussion of the related legal arguments, see Gostin, L. HIV-infected physicians and the practice of seriously invasive procedures. Hastings Center Report 1989;32–9;Google Scholar and Gostin, L. Hospitals, health care professionals, and AIDS: the “right to know” the health status of professionals and patients. Maryland Law Review 1989; 48:12; 12–54.Google Scholar

3. For a survey of what has, so far, been established regarding the different forms of impairment, see Benzer, DG. Healing the healer: a primer on physician impairment. Wisconsin Medical Journal 1991;90:70–9;Google ScholarPubMed and Nadelson, C. Physician Stress and Impairment. The Sandoz Visiting Professorship Lecture, Medical College of South Africa.Google Scholar

4. See note 3. Benzer, , 1991;90:70. Chemical dependency accounts for about 80% of cases of impairment reported to state physician health programs. See also Nadelson.Google Scholar

5. See note 3. Benzer, , 1991;90:70.Google Scholar

6. See note 3. Benzer, , 1991;90:70.Google Scholar

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8. See note 7. 1991;31.

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23. See note 3. Nadelson.

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