干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Introduction: The medical team’s telling the truth about the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis and the patient’s, particularly the old patient’s, knowing the truth about the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis has always been an ethically complex issue. Our aim was to analyze the ? 65 year old patients’ approaches to "knowing the truth" in detail, to clarify the problems and to propose some solutions.

Materials and Method: In addition to a Likert-type survey to question thoughts about telling the truth to the patients and patient’s knowing the truth, questions on demographic data were also included in the questionnaire form. t test, chi square test, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, frequency and percentages were used to analyze the data. To that end, the statistical program SPSS 15.0 was used.

Results: Of the patients 55.6% mentioned that they knew their diagnosis correctly whereas 44.4% mentioned that they did not. The percentage of patients who mentioned that they would not want to be informed in case of a situation that would upset them was 48.9%.

Conclusion: Old people may feel good-for-nothing, alone and deserted, and may suffer from psychological breakdown when an issue is imposed upon them. Therefore, they should have correct and understandable information about their illness.