Diagnosis

"76. Guided by this integrally human and properly Christian understanding of sickness, the health care worker...formulates the diagnosis and the related prognosis...."

"77....he must guard against the opposite extremes of diagnostic abandonment and diagnostic obstinancy....In the first case, the patient is compelled to go from one specialist or one health care service to another, without finding the physician or the diagnostic center able and willing to treat his ailment....In the second case, in contrast, there is a stubborn insistence on an excess of diagnostic tests, aimed at finding a sickness at all costs.  One may be tempted...to medicalize problems that are not of a medical nature....A sort of obstinancy could become manifest in so-called defensive medicine...."

"78. Ruling out such excesses, and guided by full respect...diagnosis does not generally pose problems of an ethical nature....Particular problems are nonetheless posed by predictive diagnostics, because of the possible repercussion on the psychological level and forms of discrimination that may result from it."