A doctor must not disclose any information about the patient’s illness without his/her permission even to the spouse.

The NABH/DMAI Patients’ Charter on Patients’ rights gives the patients right to confidentiality about their medical condition.

The MCI Code of Ethics Regulations also requires a doctor to be discrete about patient information under Regulation 2.2 “Patience and delicacy should characterize the physician. Confidences concerning individual or domestic life entrusted by patients to a physician and defects in the disposition or character of patients observed during medical attendance should never be revealed unless their revelation is required by the laws of the State. Sometimes, however, a physician must determine whether his duty to society requires him to employ knowledge, obtained through confidence as a physician, to protect a healthy person against a communicable disease to which he is about to be exposed. In such instance, the physician should act as he would wish another to act toward one of his own family in like circumstances.”