Doctors Have Feelings, Too - NYTimes.com

Doctors Have Feelings, Too - NYTimes.com

".....Last month, an article in the journal Health Affairs made headlines in the news media — “Physicians Are Not Always Open or Honest with Patients.” A vast majority of the nearly 2,000 doctors surveyed agreed that physicians should be fully open and honest in all their communications with patients, as the Charter on Medical Professionalism requires, but more than one in 10 had specifically told a patient something that was not true within the past year. Almost one in five had not revealed a medical error. More than half had framed a prognosis in a more positive light than was warranted.

The authors expressed concern that doctors were not fully living up to the charter; patients worried that they couldn’t trust what their doctors said. I also found the data disturbing, but for different reasons. I don’t think that doctors are generally a dishonest bunch. Yes, there are a few utter miscreants out there, and many more who could use a tune-up on their communication skills. But I suspect that the dishonesty that is being uncovered in a study such as this — and frankly, I was amazed that the number of less-than-truthful instances was so low — reveals more about the diagnosis of being human than anything else.

When Julia walked out of our hospital without full knowledge of her prognosis, I had been derelict in my duty as her physician. I was fully aware that my job was to have “open and honest” communication with her, in a “patient centered” manner. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to tell this young mother that she was going to die........"

abstract: “When patients and families feel abandoned”

Conclusions

These strategies can help us maintain healing relationships with our patients by maintaining their trust, confidence, and satisfaction. Cultivating relational aspects of medical practice requires an interchange and takes time. Experienced doctors know this and continue to do so because being present and staying with the patient during difficult times is a pillar of moral and ethical training and a fundamental attribute of a good physician.

NCI : People Continue to Trust Physicians, Despite Increasing Health Information Online

"According to a recent NCI survey, the public’s trust in their physicians has continued to rise in spite of the fact that people report turning to the Internet first for their health information needs. In contrast, trust in the Internet and other more traditional sources such as television has been on the decline. The survey also showed a consistent increase in the number of Americans who communicate with their doctors through e-mail. A letter about the findings from staff who oversee NCI’s Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) appeared March 4 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Do Canadian patients trust others like them?

"Trust in a “person like yourself” has decreased from 2008 to 2009 (as have most information sources listed in the report), and dropped again in 2010. From the global 2010 Edelman report, 44% of respondents aged between 25-64 years said they would find the information from a person like them to be either ‘very credible’ or ‘extremely credible’ (down from 47% in 2009, and 58% in 2008). That’s a huge drop over the past 3 years!......Another point to keep in mind is that a “person like yourself” is not the same as a “patient like yourself”. "