A Questionnaire to Cancer Patients Who were Informed of Their Disease and Underwent Surgical Operations

Eiji Ueda, Fuyo Yoshimi, Satoshi Furukawa*, Hisayuki Ono, Yuji Asato, Hitoshi Tonouchi, Shinya Inoue, Yoshihiro Kuroki, Ryuta Amemiya, Sumihiko Koizumi, Hiroshi Hasegawa

Department of Surgery, Ibaraki Prefectural Central Hospital & Cancer Center
*First Department of Surgery, Universiy of Tokyo

We think that "Informed Consent" from cancer patients is necessary to achieve good treatment and care. We tell the truth to our patients regardless of the origin of cancer, staging, age and sex. From June 1992 to March 1995, we informed 543 cancer surgery patients of the truth of their disease. We handed out questionnaires to 366 of these patients, and obtained information from 300 of them. Most of the 177 patients who did not reply had died during the course of the study. Eighty-nine percent of the 300 patients who answered the questionnaire said it was best to be informed of the truth, whereas 1% answered they wanted to be told they did not have cancer even if it was a lie. Knowing the truth, 55% of the patients were shocked, but 87% recovered from their shock within 3 months. We respect the right not to know the truth and are only telling the truth to cancer patients after checking whether they wish to know the truth when they first come to our outpatient clinic. We concluded that it is appropriate and possible to tell the truth to cancer patients in Japan.

Key words
informed consent, questionnaire to cancer patients after surgical operations

Reprint requests
Eiji Ueda First Department of Surgery, University of Tokyo
7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku. Tokyo, 113 JAPAN

Accepted
June 12, 1996

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