Doctors Are Liars

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: Getting to the Medical Truth

Competency: managing self

Who benefits: those in need of medical care

Consultant Usage: limited

What’s it about? Today’s post is short. It will be extremely important to a few readers, potentially important to a few others and will be seen as of limited use to many of you. So I am just going to get to point.

When you have medical talks with your doctor, they will often lie to you. They do it primarily because they are altruistic people … or they are in a hurry. When they don’t know or aren’t sure, they tend to give you or yours the benefit of the doubt. They say things like “20%” when they mean “5%”. In their minds these numbers are similar enough. But you may have to make a decision based on that number. And it could be a bad decision just because you don’t have the right information.

Dr. Peter Ubel is a physician and a behavioral scientist at Duke University. He is extremely concerned about patient/doctor relationships and how patients and doctors communicate and make decisions.

It is much more complicated than it seems as he describes in his book Critical Decisions: How You and Your Doctor Can Make the Right Medical Choices Together.

I want to keep focused on what is important about this book. So here are the three critical points: (1) It offers specific advice to doctors on how to communicate honestly with patients; (2) It tells all of us how doctors think; and (3) it teaches patients how to ask the right questions.

If those points are of importance to you, read the book.

You can also get more (and free) readings from Dr. Ubel on his Blog: Peter Ubel on Health, Well-Being, Bioethics, and Behavioral Economics. There is an especially interesting post on why getting your appendix taken out can cost between $2,000 and $180,000 (not a typo).

Finally, there is another recently released book that has received much praise on Amazon: When Doctors Don’t Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests. I haven’t read it, but I am impressed with the passionate support it has received by readers/reviewers. The common theme seems to be “How to take charge of your health and take an active role when consulting with a doctor.”

Catch you later. 

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.