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Understanding Treatment: The Communication Disconnect Between Doctors And Patients

Over the long week­end I caught up on some read­ing. One arti­cle* stands out. It’s on informed con­sent, and the stun­ning dis­con­nect between physi­cians’ and patients’ under­stand­ing of a procedure’s value.

The study, pub­lished in the Sept 7th Annals of Inter­nal Med­i­cine, used sur­vey meth­ods to eval­u­ate 153 car­di­ol­ogy patients’ under­stand­ing of the poten­tial ben­e­fit of per­cu­ta­neous coro­nary inter­ven­tion (PCI or angio­plasty). The inves­ti­ga­tors, at Baystate Med­ical Cen­ter in Mass­a­chu­setts, com­pared patients’ responses to those of car­di­ol­o­gists who obtained con­sent and who per­formed the pro­ce­dure. As out­lined in the article’s intro­duc­tion, PCI reduces heart attacks in patients with acute coro­nary syn­drome — a more unsta­ble sit­u­a­tion than is chronic sta­ble angina, in which case PCI relieves pain and improves qual­ity of life but has no ben­e­fit in terms of recur­rent myocar­dial infarc­tion (MI) or survival.

The main result was that, after dis­cussing the pro­ce­dure with a car­di­ol­o­gist and sign­ing the form, 88 percent of the patients, who almost all had chronic sta­ble angina, believed that PCI would reduce their per­sonal risk for hav­ing a heart attack. Only 17 percent of the car­di­ol­o­gists, who com­pleted sur­veys about these par­tic­u­lar patients and the poten­tial ben­e­fit of PCI for patients fac­ing sim­i­lar sce­nar­ios, indi­cated that PCI would reduce the like­li­hood of MI.

This strik­ing dif­fer­ence in patients’ and doc­tors’ per­cep­tions is all the more sig­nif­i­cant because 96 percent of the patients “felt that they knew why they might undergo PCI, and more than half stated that they were actively involved in the decision-making.” Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*

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