Patient Confidentiality

I am a huge fan of Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice. Recently on the last few episodes of Private Practice, one of the doctors is being sued and liable to lose their license for a releasing a book that entailed personal information about one of their clients. One of the clients read the book and decided to sue the doctor for breach of confidentiality. This is one of the few ethical topics, that I disagree with in terms on breach of confidentiality. Within the show, most of the doctors would asked their peers to answer different scenarios. This in my opinion is ok, physicians are merely getting an outside perspective. Each doctor within the business had a different specialty and looked at each case from another view. I feel that once a physician is very deep into their specialty they forget to look at the problem from a different light. Even on the program HOUSE, which has a doctor on there who specializes in solving difficult diagnosis, he still steps outside of his group and ask for other opinions as well.

Back to Private Practice, now while what the doctor decided to do in publishing the book that was still very closely related to her life was wrong. It was wrong for the fact that she was too close to the book and that the events were not that far from past. No one in the book was deceased, so she ran the risk of offending someone who's personal secrets she had kept and now was displaying for the rest of the world for an easy dollar. Most of what she wrote did come back to bite her, when there were losses of clients who worried that their stories would be in the next edition. That right there should have told her that you cannot continue to practice and write, if you are writing about current life events. Now while she make maintain the defense that it was part of her healing process, what doctor in their write mind decides to let every secret in their life out. Her husband on the show made to point time and time again and yet she did not listen. And because of the book, the practice in the end had to shut down to avoid each doctor working there being at risk of losing their license as well.