Telling Patients the Truth In regards to the permissibility of deception on the part of Sokol, the writer (2006) ultimately argues that "withholding…information from…patients would be ethically permissible and, more generally, that honesty is not always the best policy" (p. 19). Sokol reaches this conclusion by evaluating a real life case study in which a daughter is willing to donate her kidney to an individual whom she believes is her father. However, while medically evaluating the former for compliance with kidney transplant criteria, the doctors determined that the pair cannot be biologically related. The critical determinant in Sokol's conclusion (2006) is that "The testing was not...

19). Essentially, the author utilizes this case study to reason that informing the patients of this situation could provide too many unnecessary complications which could negatively impact the kidney operation -- such as either of the patients refusing to do it due to the unsolicited knowledge. After examining the potential positives and the potential negatives of this situation, the author (2006) concludes that medical personnel are obliged to provide "relevant" (p. 22) truth, and not that which is otherwise.
The principle conclusion that Higgs reaches regarding the telling of…