As I had mentioned in one of my previous blog about my interest in thinking/brainstorming on various aspects of healthcare from a consumer perspective i.e. from a Patients’s perspective. I have now started to think and understand more about ‘Doctor – Patient Relationships‘ and ‘How do patients get treated?‘. After a lot of reading/research, personal experiences, and talking/debating with many doctors including my brother – I think now I am able to come to some kind of better understanding and hypothesis in this area.
One such point of curiosity for me was to understand how do patients get treated in general. What drives a patient to a doctor? What are his/her real pain-points or drivers? I also had the curiosity from doctor’s perspective.
Doctor and Patient Relationship (img src - National Human Genome Research Institute)
How do doctors treat a patient? What goes on in their mind from the moment they see the patient? What logic do they use to prescribe the treatment which they prescribe? Do they have a crystal ball which tells them what the patient is suffering from? Do they have cheat-sheets which they look at? Or sometimes very simply put – do they really listen to what the patients are saying? I really wanted to get into their brains! I started talking with few of my friends and soon they got curious too.
So we started reading and researching and talking with many closely associated with this profession. Very soon, we realized that this is not the area where lots have been researched about or talked about. It is just assumed that both doctors and patients act and behave in a certain way – without each party completely knowing or understanding the ‘why‘ part. For example – no two doctors have given me a coherent/similar answer on my question as to why they think many patients have difficulty in communicating or describing their health problems to them. Neither have many regular patients been logically able to tell us about why do they think doctors misdiagnose some times. Our point was not that either party have a fault that they don’t know this. But it is that both parties (doctors and patients) have probably been operating under lots of assumptions about each other which sometimes are not the most correct ones. It just felt that there was lot of mystery in the ‘why‘ aspect of the behavior/approach of both the parties than there really should be.
The first question in our mind – should we start demystifying this? Should both the parties (again doctor and patient) make an effort to understand why the other behaves/acts in a certain manner? And our straight-forward answer for this was – absolutely! Our reasoning was that if both patients and doctors understand these aspects of behavioral drivers – it can only ultimately result in better doctor-patient communication. This would certainly result in better Doctor-Patient Relationship and hence potentially better healthcare. While all the progress and development which has been happening in the area of Healthcare-associated services and technology is a good thing – the physician-patient relationship remains (and will continue to remain) fundamental to the provision of acceptable medical care.
So over the next few weeks/months – as we are in process of exploring this aspect of doctor-patient relationship – I will be blogging about what we are learning. As has been my typical style of blogging – I am thinking about breaking these findings into several but discrete blogs. My aim is also to continue getting your thoughts and comments also on the same.
Stay tuned!
January 24, 2010 at 8:53 pm |
Hello
which subset u want to analyze. the poor , the middle class or the affluent class where doctors dress and the room he sits in matter more than his knowledge.
January 29, 2010 at 10:10 am |
[...] should we care about the name of the Disease? By manishrathi [In my previous blog, I had mentioned that I would be talking about various aspects of Doctor - Patient Relationship [...]