Doctors don’t always know best—even if they still think they do.
Too many doctors are paternalistic and don’t listen to patients’ concerns about their symptoms, a survey of 676 patients and 400 doctors discovered.
The patients said they felt ‘degraded and dehumanised’, according to researchers from the University of Cambridge, who carried out the survey, and almost half weren’t even asked for their opinions about what was wrong with them.
The patients were suffering from neuropsychiatric lupus (NPSLE), a disease that is very difficult to diagnose, and has symptoms such as headaches, hallucinations and depression.
Because of this, the patients’ own description of their symptoms becomes essential—and yet their fears and comments were invariably dismissed. Doctors ranked the patients’ own self-assessments as the least important of 13 different types of evidence used in diagnosis. Just 3 percent of the doctors ranked self-assessments in their top three sources of evidence.
Most instead ranked their own assessments as being the most important.
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