When Doctors and Patients Disagree About Medical Futility

Medical futility. When is enough, enough?

When patients and surgeons disagree about surgical outcome: investigating patient factors and chart note communication

OBJECTIVE Effective physician-patient communication is a critical component of a clinical practice and in order to achieve optimal patient outcomes. We aimed to investigate indirect effects of physician-patient communication by examining the relationship between a physician-patient mismatch in perceived outcomes and content in the medical record's clinical note. We compared patient records whos...

Communicating with physicians about medical decisions: a reluctance to disagree.

E ffective patient-physician communication is essential for shared decision making, considered by some to be the “pinnacle” of patientcentered care. Many health care decisions have multiple options and no correct choice. These are called preference-sensitive decisions, and the optimal decision is one that takes into account patient preferences and values in a collaborative process with the phys...

Buddhism and medical futility.

Religious faith and medicine combine harmoniously in Buddhist views, each in its own way helping Buddhists enjoy a more fruitful existence. Health care providers need to understand the spiritual needs of patients in order to provide better care, especially for the terminally ill. Using a recently reported case to guide the reader, this paper examines the issue of medical futility from a Buddhis...

Disagreeing About What We Disagree About

Two studies examined misperceptions of disagreement in partisan social conflicts, namely, in the debates over abortion (Study 1) and politics (Study 2). We observed that partisans tend to exaggerate differences of opinion with their adversaries. Further, we found that perceptions of disagreement were more pronounced for values that were central to the perceiver’s own ideology than for values th...