The Washington Post reports on an American Medical Association (AMA) series on what doctors wish their patients knew.
Most doctors say they wish they could spend more time with their patients — in one 2017 survey, 95 percent of primary-care physicians surveyed said they wished they could do more to help their patients.The series offers bite-sized articles about a variety of health issues, including eczema, birth control, child obesity and microplastics. Each piece features a practicing physician and AMA member who shares what they wish their patients knew about the topic. The goal is providing a base of shared knowledge so patients get more out of visits with their medical providers, the association says on its website.
The series can be found on the AMA’s website: What Doctors Wish Patients Knew™, saying:
When it comes to effective doctor-patient communication, it’s important that both parties are speaking from a base of shared knowledge. The American Medical Association provides a space where physicians share what they want patients to understand about today’s health care headlines.
The website covers a range of topics that appear to be arranged randomly in no particular order. There is a search feature, but I could not find a table of contents. Although the topics appear to be well written they provide limited information. It’s not clear that the series offers any advantages over using Google and reading articles on the plethora of recognized content providers, like WebMD, Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, etc. I’m not denigrating it. The more reputable health information there is on the Internet the better. Indeed, spending a few minutes perusing the Internet can teach patients far more about their health than their physicians could ever have time to convey in person.
Americans visit their physicians about 1 billion times a year. That works out to about three visits per individual. Office visits are not distributed equally. Visits are more concentrated among less healthy individuals, while others may not see a doctor at all. Physicians are the gatekeepers to most therapies and treatments. There is an old joke: what is the most expensive medical device? It’s the physician’s pen, because a physician must prescribe all drugs, order all treatments and authorize all hospital admissions. Sometimes you go to your doctor for answers. Other times you go to your doctor for permission. It’s an imperfect system, partly due to the shortage of physicians, bureaucratic third-party payment and an outdated practice model.
At its core the doctor/patient relationship is an information exchange. The patient describes symptoms to their physician, who prescribes on an appropriate therapy, orders diagnostic testing if needed or stays the course for an existing therapy. The process does not work very well. Estimates vary but the average duration of physician visits is supposedly 18 minutes. Another source estimates the median duration of a physician visit at 15.7 minutes. Of that the patient spoke for five minutes, while the physician also spoke for five minutes. Neither spoke for about one minute.
A few years ago I read that the average time a patient spoke before a physician interrupted them was about nine seconds. Your doctor is not rude; he or she is busy and needs to keep the conversation on track. The average number of topics discussed is 6.5 so it’s easy to see how a conversation could go off-track and how little information can be discussed about any given problem. Also adversely affecting the information exchange is the problem that patients forget to ask about half the questions they meant to ask and retain only about half of the information they are told. That suggests they walk away with only about 25% of the information patients hoped to receive.
As I’ve discussed before, a new model of telemedicine involving interactive group therapy using social media (social medicine, but not socialized medicine) is a way to substantially increase the exchange of information. We just need to force regulators to catch up and not block it out of their instinctive protectionism.
To read more about group therapy see: