@IMEstudents 1/ Wessely has written 1 paper involving ethics, "To Tell or Not to Tell", where he states that he's uninformed abt the field. Then he considers hysteria ("a tough old bird"), and asks whether drs should tell patients the truth abt that diagnosis... google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j…
@IMEstudents 2/ He concludes by advising that drs should deliberately mislead patients so they'll comply w treatment, w advice on how best to deceive. (That advice led to the construct of #FND.) Wessely never considers the right to informed consent...
@IMEstudents 3/ or the profound disrespect of patients autonomy that arises in every case where a dr lies to a patient abt diagnosis. He never considers ethical ramifications of advising neurologists to abandon the most basic demands of medical ethics with this patient group...
@IMEstudents 4/ and he never considers how it might be socially unjust to lead drs to abandon truth telling, informed consent, and respect for patient autonomy in a patient group of predominantly women. This paper has had a massive impact on medicine's approach to undiagnosed symptoms...
@IMEstudents 5/ that is, MUS. More than any other paper, it has sanctioned routine violation of the rights of women with undiagnosed symptoms, as if gender somehow explains why it would be ok to abandon medical ethics with a legally competent patient group...
@IMEstudents 6/ No bioethicist besides myself has ever considered the arguments in this paper, the harm it's done to patients, to women, to neurology, to the patient-doctor relationship. Because Wessely is highly respected, no one has had the courage to say...
@IMEstudents 7/ that this paper directly advices drs to embrace unethical patient care without even bothering to support that recommendation with ethical arguments. Ethics students: you need to read this paper as if a first-year student wrote it and ask: would you give this a passing grade?
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