This one word can kill as surely as a bullet
Dr Vernon Coleman
Long, long ago, when caring wasn’t a crime and health professionals actually wanted their patients to recover, doctors didn’t always tell patients if they had a serious disease such as cancer. They made a judgement about whether or not the patient could cope with the news and then sometimes used euphemisms to soften the blow. These days, doctors seem to take great delight in telling patients the worst news in a very blunt way. (Though there will always be a nurse on hand with a box of tissues ready). Doctors don’t sugar coat their diagnoses and they offer little in the way of hope.
It is a sin not to offer all patients some hope. Indeed, it is a doctor’s duty. There is always hope.
When I was a GP I had two patients with terminal illnesses who lived for many years after they had been abandoned by hospital doctors. Both had reasons to stay alive. One patient had such appalling blood test results that the hospital laboratory told me that she must be dead. I gave up doing blood tests and she lived for years.
There is good anecdotal evidence that many patients live much longer when they don’t know what is really wrong with them. Susan Hill, the writer, tells how her mother was told she had ‘ulcers’. She had a kidney, a large section of bowel and bladder and her uterus removed. The surgeon told Ms Hill’s mother that she would get well and she did – enjoying three years of excellent health. And then a friend referred to the illness by name. Susan Hill said that her mother was horrified and ‘shrivelled and died in eight weeks’.
A doctor who works a good deal with cancer patients said this: ‘Tell the patient the truth, but only as much as they can bear and never, ever, remove hope.’
Doctors who insist on telling all their patients the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth are presumably deliberately trying to murder their patients. And hospitals which put all their patients in a special department labelled `CANCER’ or `ONCOLOGY’ may be helping their own administration but they are damned sure not helping their patients.
NOTE
The essay above was adapted from Vernon Coleman’s book `The End of Medicine’ which can be purchased from the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com
Copyright Vernon Coleman November 2026
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