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Medical mindset influences decision making
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SAN FRANCISCO — A pair of authors suggested physicians consider their own “medical mindset” when they or their patients are faced with making medical decisions.
“The public has become acutely aware that experts disagree,” Pamela Hartzband, MD, said, citing the wealth of information available via various media and interpreted and disseminated differently. The same data are valued differently because of different mindsets, the authors said.
Jerome Groopman, MD, together with Hartzband, authors of Your Medical Mind, posed a new approach to medical decision making to fellow physician colleagues at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery meeting.
Pamela Hartzband, MD, and Jerome Groopman, MD, discuss making medical decisions during the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery meeting in San Francisco.
Through in-depth interviews of patients, Groopman and Hartzband found common threads of personality that influence a patient’s medical mindset. Some people are minimalists and some are maximalists; some have a naturalism orientation and some have a technology orientation; some are believers and some are doubters.
“Doctors have a mindset, too,” Hartzband said, suggesting that individual physicians respond differently to patient questions in accordance with their own mindset.
“We’re not suggesting that the doctor and the patient need to have the same medical mindset, the same point of view,” Hartzband said. “Sometimes being challenged can help you to make a better decision. But doctors need to understand and respect the patient’s mindset, and patients need to be aware that the doctor — the expert — has a mindset, too.”
Disclosure: Groopman and Hartzband are coauthors of Your Medical Mind.