Well, as I said, it depends. Someone with a clinical depression requires a different approach from someone who, say, doesn’t want to take statins even though he has high LDL.
The real underlying issue is that of power. Doctors that I know tend to have the unfortunate tendency to develop a God complex—they get used to simple, uninformed people coming to them asking for help and the doctors literally having life-and-death power over these people. But that’s a different discussion.
Patient intelligence and education is a huge factor. Many people don’t understand probabilities at all and can’t differentiate between real evidence and rhetorical tricks.
I have conflicting feelings about how I should handle patients I can’t adequately inform because of their limitations. What’s the point of trying to explain real evidence if delivery is all that matters in their decision process? It’s not like there’s any real exchange of information in those situations.
Yes, I understand the problem. I don’t know if there’s a good solution. Saying “it depends” is a cop-out, but on the other hand there is no global optimum and all you have is different trade-offs. And picking among different trade-offs—well, it depends and we’re back to square one.
To whomever downvoted every comment by Lumifer: I had to break my policy and upvote him for no good reason. I don’t believe in punishing conversation I want to be part of, especially if it’s about a topic where bias is to be expected. I also think that reasons for systematic downvoting should be stated if one expects it to have any positive effect.
Thanks but I don’t really care that much about karma. I have enough so that the website doesn’t limit what I can do and otherwise it’s a number. Occasionally someone will just go through a bunch of my posts and click-click-click-click on all of them. Oh well, maybe he just likes to click on things… :-)
Well, as I said, it depends. Someone with a clinical depression requires a different approach from someone who, say, doesn’t want to take statins even though he has high LDL.
The real underlying issue is that of power. Doctors that I know tend to have the unfortunate tendency to develop a God complex—they get used to simple, uninformed people coming to them asking for help and the doctors literally having life-and-death power over these people. But that’s a different discussion.
Patient intelligence and education is a huge factor. Many people don’t understand probabilities at all and can’t differentiate between real evidence and rhetorical tricks.
I have conflicting feelings about how I should handle patients I can’t adequately inform because of their limitations. What’s the point of trying to explain real evidence if delivery is all that matters in their decision process? It’s not like there’s any real exchange of information in those situations.
Yes, I understand the problem. I don’t know if there’s a good solution. Saying “it depends” is a cop-out, but on the other hand there is no global optimum and all you have is different trade-offs. And picking among different trade-offs—well, it depends and we’re back to square one.
To whomever downvoted every comment by Lumifer: I had to break my policy and upvote him for no good reason. I don’t believe in punishing conversation I want to be part of, especially if it’s about a topic where bias is to be expected. I also think that reasons for systematic downvoting should be stated if one expects it to have any positive effect.
Thanks but I don’t really care that much about karma. I have enough so that the website doesn’t limit what I can do and otherwise it’s a number. Occasionally someone will just go through a bunch of my posts and click-click-click-click on all of them. Oh well, maybe he just likes to click on things… :-)