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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Patient Communication Study Shows Doctors Regularly Withhold Truth

Catherine Pearson
The Huffington Post - Healthy Living
Originally published February 9, 2012

If you think your doctor is hiding something from you, you might be right.

According to a new study, published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs, some physicians are not always forthright when it comes to patient communication, withholding information about medical errors, relationships with drug companies and severity of a person's prognosis.

"It should be a source of caution," said Dr. Lisa Lezzioni, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the study's author. "The caution requires patients to think about and discuss what they want in terms of communication with their doctors."

Researchers surveyed more than 1,800 physicians from around the country, working in a variety of specialties, to ask about how they perceive and handle patient communications.

Nearly 35 percent of respondents said they did not "completely agree" that they should disclose serious medical errors to their patients, and approximately 20 percent said they had not revealed a mistake to a patient in the last year because they feared being sued.

Additionally, 35 percent of the doctors said they did not "completely agree" that they should disclose their financial relationships with drug and medical device companies, and 11 percent admitted that they had told a patient something untrue in the past year.

The entire story is here.

Here is a portion of the abstract from the original article in Health Affairs.

Overall, approximately one-third of physicians did not completely agree with disclosing serious medical errors to patients, almost one-fifth did not completely agree that physicians should never tell a patient something untrue, and nearly two-fifths did not completely agree that they should disclose their financial relationships with drug and device companies to patients. Just over one-tenth said they had told patients something untrue in the previous year. Our findings raise concerns that some patients might not receive complete and accurate information from their physicians, and doubts about whether patient-centered care is broadly possible without more widespread physician endorsement of the core communication principles of openness and honesty with patients.