Doctors and other medical professionals occasionally joke about their patients' problems. Some of these jokes are clearly wrong, but some joking between medical professionals is not only ethical, it can actually be beneficial, concludes an article in the Hastings Center Report.
The author, Katie Watson, bridges the worlds of medical ethics and comedy: she is an assistant professor in the Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and she teaches improvisation and writing at The Second City Training Center in Chicago. What prompted her to explore the ethics of gallows humor in medicine was the story a doctor friend told her in which, years earlier, he and other residents tried unsuccessfully to save a teenage pizza delivery boy who had been shot while delivering their dinner.
After finding the pizza box where the boy dropped it before running from his attackers, one of the residents made a joke: "How much you think we ought to tip him?" The residents laughed, and then ate the pizza. Eurekalert!
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