The Boston Globe had a brief interview with me last Monday, and commenter “MikeScanlon” gave a great additional reason to go “e”:
Doctors are required to respond to a lot of things – health insurance requirements, liability insurance requirements, rules and regulations of all sort – and finally, the assumptions about their patients that they must make when individual acquaintance is lacking; Yet each patient is an individual.
Unless the patient participates actively in their health care, and partners with their doctor, they leave the doctor no choice but to make a standard set of decisions, which includes assumptions about the patient’s ability to deal with the science and to follow regimes. It is a frustration on both sides I would think.
The equation is simple: help your doctor care for you by caring for your doctor and understanding her, or his, position and needs.”
I agree with Dave that patients should consider their doctors, the patients which give more attention to their doctors are in better chance of curing themselves.
Good post and interview in the Boston Globe. The equation is very simple indeed. Do you see any potential barriers to patient participation? I don’t mean to probe but I just get uncomfortable making simple equations that are often value laden and raise important questions about access to knowledge. Do you think we ought to start some conversations on ways patients can indeed participate in their care in actual practice when making decisions about their care with others rather than telling them to simply participate? What does participation look like? What does participation sound like? Who is doing it particularly well in the clinic?