To tell or not to tell.

The three articles in this At Issue section all deal with important aspects of patient education. In the article below, B.F. Hoffmann discusses the problem of telling the patient this diagnosis, and the therapeutic issues that must be considered in this process. In the second article, M. Linden and R. Chaskel focus on issues of informed consent in patients undergoing long-term pharmacotherapy, and present results of a study that assesses how much patients really know about the benefits and risks of their treatment program. Finally, C. Pilsecker describes his experiences in teaching a class about schizophrenia to hospitalized patients, and their understandable difficulties in accepting the fact that even the best, most recent research studies provide few certain answers about this puzzling disorder.