Regarding Peter Link's July 1 letter, "Considerations of a troublemaker": Certainly, it seemed that, some time ago, medical doctors in Japan did not like giving proper explanations to patients. One reason for this is that generally they haven't had enough time for each patient as there always were so many patients waiting to see them. Another reason may have to do with their level of self-confidence.
However, recently, the situation has been changing partly because, in some court rulings, doctors have been accused of failing to provide sufficient explanations to patients. As for my own family, nowadays we feel we can ask doctors for explanations of treatments more freely than we could one or two decades ago. The change may not be rapid enough, though, and the situation may differ by region in Japan.
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