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Understanding Treatment: The Communication Disconnect Between Doctors And Patients

November 30th, 2010 by Elaine Schattner, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion, Research
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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*

The iPad In The OR

June 17th, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, News, Research
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Felasfa Wodajo, an orthopedic oncologist in Virginia, recently took his iPad into the operating theater to see how it performs in such an environment.

Being one of the editors at iMedicalApps, Dr. Wodajo just published his initial findings and they bode a rather bright clincial future for the iPad, and tablets in general.

SOURCE: iMedicalApps: Test driving the iPad in the hospital Operating Room…

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

Science-Based Medicine: Why It’s Difficult To Research Surgery

April 8th, 2010 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Research
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One of the things about science-based medicine that makes it so fascinating is that it encompasses such a wide variety of modalities that it takes a similarly wide variety of science and scientific techniques to investigate various diseases. Some medical disciplines consist of mainly of problems that are relatively straightforward to study. Don’t get me wrong, though. By “straightforward” I don’t mean that they’re easy, simply that the experimental design of a clinical trial to test a treatment is fairly easily encompassed by the paradigm of randomized clinical trials.

Medical oncology is just one example, where new drugs can be tested in randomized, double-blinded trials against or in addition to the standard of care without having to account for many difficulties that arise from difficulties blinding. We’ve discussed such difficulties before, for instance, in the context of constructing adequate placebos for acupuncture trials.

Indeed, this topic is critical to the application of science-based medicine to various “complementary and alternative medicine” modalities, which do not as easily lend themselves to randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials, although I would hasten to point out that, just because it can be very difficult to do such trials is not an excuse for not doing them. The development of various “sham acupuncture” controls, one of which consisted even of just twirling a toothpick gently poked onto the skin, shows that.

One area of medicine where it is difficult to construct randomized controlled trials is surgery. The reasons are multiple. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*