Wise Choices
Here is another ridiculously obvious statement from an article in the American Medical News:
Achieving superior clinical outcomes often depends less on physicians making the right diagnosis and recommending the correct treatment and more on their patients’ willingness to take the necessary steps to maintain or improve their health.
And this is written by Kevin O’Reilly, a friend of mine. C’mon man, you’re better than that. Yes, ultimately, it is the patients with the problems and they are the most important factor in fixing them. Even if we have medications that can help their diseases, patients can surely screw things up by not doing their part. It’s a good thing that ALL quality indicators are basing OUR pay on patient’s behavior. Make sense.
You were expecting this comment, weren’t you?
A lot of doctors (my biggest gripe is with psychiatrists, but other doctors are not immune), would rather listen to a few keywords a patient uses, not listen to the patient at all otherwise, and diagnose and prescribe. The patient is often given drugs which are both dangerous for their “other” effects and often totally ineffective for their “main” effects (thanks to the marketing team of the pharmaceutical company convincing doctors that the drug is a miracle, after cherry-picking data which still does not prove that issue). If the patient chooses to not follow this “advice”, the patient is further stigmatized as “non-compliant”.
Go on and blame the patient. The doctor is supposed to be a healer, not a drug-pusher. Try listening sometime. I know you’re too busy to do this, but not doing it violates your own oaths.