When a physician’s ‘noble’ reassurance leads to a patient’s unsought treatment
When a doctor tells a patient that his or her symptoms are normal within some given context, the patient may ignore the contextualization and only hear “You’re normal.” As shown in a new study, the partially received message can be a problem.
How so? By inadvertently encouraging the patient to forego treatments the physician goes on to recommend.
Researchers at UC–San Diego’s Rady School of Management flesh out the phenomenon in a study published Aug. 10 in Nature Human Behaviour.
For the study, PhD candidate Seyi Lawal and colleagues conducted more than a dozen experiments with more than 9,300 volunteer participants representing a broad variety of health conditions.
The subjects vicariously experienced, via online means, medical situations in which healthcare providers either described symptoms as normal or did not do so.
Next, Lawal and team gauged the willingness of the stand-in patients to seek treatment.
The researchers then compared participants’ follow-up intentions with providers’ expectations.
“Providers expected that ‘normalizing’ a patient’s symptoms would increase their treatment likelihood, or at worst have no impact,” Lawal tells UC–San Diego’s news operation.
However, the participants “actually reacted in the opposite way.”
Well-meaning dereliction of duty?
In their study abstract, Lawal and co-researchers state they found that normalization “triggers a reappraisal of treatment norms, where people infer that their healthcare provider is normalizing their symptoms to communicate that treatment is not warranted.”
They name their sizable sample as a strength while acknowledging the study’s experimental and online design as a limitation.
In the university news item, senior study author On Amir, PhD, says that doctors “usually have a noble goal” in downplaying the need for follow-up care when patients’ symptoms are “normal” within a given context. “They mean to ease anxiety, but somehow it backfires.”
“Doctors shouldn’t stop reassuring patients,” Amir adds. “But they should make their meaning unmistakable.”
The UCSD news item is here, the full study here (behind paywall).
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.