All kinds of personal secrets provided by patients for medical needs, the confidentiality of some patients' own illness, the illness, personality and health status of some famous people, and conversations involving personal, national and social secrets during treatment should be kept strictly confidential.

Because medical confidentiality requires medical staff to keep medical secrets in the prevention and treatment of diseases, they must not disclose the privacy and condition of patients, so ethical conditions are formulated.

Medical confidentiality is one of the unique categories of medical ethics and has always been required by medical ethics. As early as more than two thousand years ago, the ancient Greek Hippocratic oath put forward the requirement of confidentiality.