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I thought this article somewhat buried the interesting part with lots of only tangentially-related anecdotes. I loved the doctors nuanced takes on what transpar

I thought this article somewhat buried the interesting part with lots of only tangentially-related anecdotes. I loved the doctors nuanced takes on what transparency can mean for medical professionals, and thought the other examples were misplaced (focusing not so much on transparency, but on other things like measurement difficulty, process adherence, etc). I was a little surprised that the section on transparency in government didn't touch at all on executive privilege which is obviously a big topic right now. I thought one point in particular was very well made: transparency in and of itself should not be a goal. We should have a specific outcome we're trying to achieve, and transparency should be an option, but not the only option considered. For the medical case, maybe the goal is improving portability of medical records (critical!) but we need to think about what mandating transparency does to all the things the doctor mentions (people using Dr Google, oversharing to family members, etc).

tsimionescu 3y ago
> I thought one point in particular was very well made: transparency in and of itself should not be a goal That is indeed a point that the article makes, but it ignores a significant problem. Good medical practice relies on the patient's informed consent. I'm not the doctor's plaything, their problem to solve, the doctor is there to help me make good decisions on my own health. If the doctor has private thoughts about me and my condition, thoughts that they don't think they should share with me, those should not be part of the treatment decisions, since I should be given all relevant information about my treatment before consenting to it. So, I would say transparency of records is actually a good in itself, insofar as it is almost equivalent to informed consent, which is a basic human right. Of course, things are not so simple in cases like psychiatry, where coercive treatment is sometimes necessary.

tsimionescu 3y ago

> I thought one point in particular was very well made: transparency in and of itself should not be a goal That is indeed a point that the article makes, but it ignores a significant problem. Good medical practice relies on the patient's informed consent. I'm not the doctor's plaything, their problem to solve, the doctor is there to help me make good decisions on my own health. If the doctor has private thoughts about me and my condition, thoughts that they don't think they should share with me, those should not be part of the treatment decisions, since I should be given all relevant information about my treatment before consenting to it. So, I would say transparency of records is actually a good in itself, insofar as it is almost equivalent to informed consent, which is a basic human right. Of course, things are not so simple in cases like psychiatry, where coercive treatment is sometimes necessary.