Agree doctors are people too. They have a tough job.
I think the patients and society in general are heavily trained to consider doctors as gods. Every tool imaginable is used to do this no doubt; Including, but not limited to television.
This puts tremendous burden on the doctors, and probably serves as a useful tool to keep the majority if doctors strickly following the official CDC treatment consensus. The CDC consensus being; treat physical disease and mental illness for all practical purposes.
Frustrating, but the system is changing. People are becoming more informed and this really helps IMO.
This is a complicated one. I think that a lot of senior medical professional are keen to play up the abilities of doctors, as it's helpful for their own prestige, for negotiations over budgets and salaries, etc. While front-line doctors generally seem to be more reasonable than the people who float up to positions of authority, there doesn't seem to be much of a desire to point out that society thinks too highly of doctors during pay negotiations, or discussions about self-regulation.
Doctors are humans, and it's important to try to be understanding of the difficult situation that they are often in.... but they also tend to have rather more power over these matters than patients, and the social situation seems to be one which often favours the interests of doctors. If the majority of doctors were truly committed to changing the system in a way which would improve matters for patients, even if it harmed their own interests, then things would rapidly improve.
It is interesting that not so many decades ago, the tact often taken by doctors was to be very judicious with the truth, when it was perceived that the truth might be too much to bear for a given patient.
For example, certain patients who had incurable fatal diseases might not be told of the diagnosis themselves, the facts of the matter only given to some other family member. Similarly, many a person told by their doctor that they had say a fatal cancer would keep this fact to themselves, and not inform their family, because they considered it too much to bear for their family.
Being judicious with the truth — truth management, if you like — was a very common approach to dealing with things, not only in medicine, but in many walks of life.
It is only in recent decades that we have begun to slowly bring everything above board, making the facts of all sorts of areas of life much more visible and available. It is all part of the Information Age we have entered into. But this approach is a brave new world, and, coming back to medicine, whether it is wise to go for a "total truth" approach in medicine, or whether is wise to still keep certain details confidential, is a matter for debate.
Perhaps sometimes certain facts are best not brought up. Nobody tells their girlfriend that their backside looks fat, even if it does.
It was not just in medicine: many different areas of social power were able to get away with treating others with disdain. As it becomes harder to control the flow of information, and people come to realise that they are being managed without their consent, disgust at this forces improvements in the way that people are treated.
There are practical reasons which make it difficult for people to avoid being manipulated and managed, but I cannot think of an instance where there was an open discussion about whether people wanted to be, and the majority decided that they did.
People like honesty in the long run. It can cause people short-term problems, but being able to trust one another brings long-term benefits. That includes discussing weight issues in a relationship imo - one can be honest and open while still being caring and gentle.
Well that is a very polarized view.
I did not in fact give opinion, I just described the historical cultural practices of medicine — where the medical profession has come from — in order to open up debate.
But if we are going to be scientific and factual here, then whether "judicious management of the facts" versus "the raw blunt truth" is the best approach, in terms of the health and wellbeing of the patient, can probably only be determined by a controlled study.
Such a trial would be founded on an embrace of pragmatism which many reject. Even if we accept that this is a matter which should be assessed in pragmatic terms (I do not), in order to gather meaningful data we would need a trial which accounted for the long-run social impact of running the trial. eg: One would need to run one arm of the trial is a society which was intolerant of deception by doctors, and the other in a society which accepted such practices.
What we commonly see, particularly with CFS, is poorly run trials by biased researchers which provided shoddy pragmatic justifications for treating patients in morally dubious ways. I think that the long-run affect of this has not been good, and that we would have been much better off if there were no studies, but instead just open and honest moral discussion and debate.