Lies your  doctor may  be telling you

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Updated: March 11, 2012 8:42AM

WASHINGTON — Trust your doctor? A survey finds that some doctors aren’t always completely honest with their patients.

More than half admitted describing someone’s prognosis in a way they knew was too rosy. Nearly 20 percent said they hadn’t fully disclosed a medical mistake for fear of being sued. And 1 in 10 of those surveyed said they’d told a patient something that wasn’t true in the past year.

The survey, by Massachusetts researchers and published in this month’s Health Affairs, doesn’t explain why or what wasn’t true.

“I don’t think that physicians set out to be dishonest,” said lead researcher Dr. Lisa Iezzoni, a Harvard Medical School professor and director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Mongan Institute for Health Policy. She said the untruths could have been to give people hope.

But it takes open communication for patients to make fully informed decisions about their health care as opposed to the “doctor-knows-best” paternalism of medicine’s past, Iezzoni added.

The survey offers “a reason for patients to be vigilant and to be very clear with their physician about how much they do want to know,” she said. AP