Borrowing DVDs of ER from the library, I started to watch them this week. Some storylines are quite tricky in my opinion. You guys must know gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease. Doctors even have to report those patients to the authority concerned with the disease in order to do infection control and any people who have sex contacts with the patient should need careful checkup to make sure if they catch the disease. Gonococcal arthritis is the most common cause of monoarthritis in younger adults, which happened 1 day to 3months after they suffer from sexually transmitted gonorrhea.
In an episode of ER, a man in his 50s caught gonococcal arthritis and didn’t want his wife to know. Carter said it was the patient’s right if he wanted to tell his wife. Everything about patients was confidential. Doctors didn’t have the prerogative to disclose confidential information. So is the law different in America? Or was what Carter really meant that the Disease Control Center would take over the case and continue the follow-up job?
It is impossible to ask for anyone to take a vaginal or penile secretion for test without telling him or her a reason. In the situation, doctors should tell the wife no matter if it goes against the patient’s wish since it was an infectious disease. What Carter had done in the episode was quite confusing.
Now I remember something....