Daily News Q and A
Tuesday, March 27, 2007Excerpt from the interview:
"So what can patients do with their own doctors?
"There are three pillars of this. First, when the symptoms are not getting better, what else could it be? Could there be more than one thing going on? You need to ask this perfectly appropriate question to prompt revisiting the initial, anchored assumption, the working diagnosis.Second, patients know how their doctors feel about them — both warm, good feelings as well as irritation. If you're picking up vibes that are particularly negative, you need to broach that, and it's a perfectly fair thing to do. Say, 'I feel like we're not communicating well, I don't feel a sense of compatibility.' Sometimes, the doctor will say 'I'm sorry, I'm having a bad day,' but as I say in the book, when I ask colleagues who are physicians about when they went to a doctor who seemed dismissive and irritated, they said, 'I'm going to find someone else.' I think you have to take the emotional temperature of the doctor. The third key issue is: 'Is there any data that seems to contradict your assumption?' Because that's a really big cognitive error, this so-called commission bias, once you get anchored. This goes on so frequently. I used to think reading MRIs and Cat Scans was an exact science; it's like Impressionist paintings! You'd think that with more high-performance scans, the better they are, but they're generating so many images that it overwhelms the radiologist —"
