In law, with rare exception such as legislative action, change is evolutionary and methodical. Unlike biomedical science where a breakthrough can quickly lead to dramatic changes in medical practice, legal precedent is more adherent and must evolve either through the legislative process or on a court by court basis in case law. Nevertheless, compelling evidence will pave the road to change with...

The attitudes of groups of general practitioners in Belgium, the UK and the Netherlands to risk taking in medical decision making have been determined. The results indicate that many doctors seek to minimize the risks that they take when treating patients. Doctors in Belgium had the highest levels of 'no risk-taking' attitudes with 60% preferring not to take risks; Dutch doctors had the lowest ...

BACKGROUND It is increasingly accepted that patients want information about their proposed treatment, and that provision of such information may alleviate fear and may improve the process of obtaining informed consent. It is not yet clear what form such information should take. OBJECTIVE Based on differences shown previously between patients receiving standard treatment and those in clinical ...

There is confusion in the medical decision-making literature about how to handle uncertainty in medical tests. In this article, the authors consider the situation in which there is uncertainty about the pretest probability of a disease in a patient as well as uncertainty about the sensitivity and specificity of a diagnostic test for that disease. They discuss how to calculate posttest probabili...

BACKGROUND This review's goal was to determine how differences between physicians and patients in race, ethnicity and language influence the quality of the physician-patient relationship. METHODS We performed a literature review to assess existing evidence for ethnic and racial disparities in the quality of doctor-patient communication and the doctor-patient relationship. RESULTS We found c...

BACKGROUND The increasing utilization of the internet has provided a better opportunity for people to search online for health information, which was not easily available to them in the past. Studies reported that searching on the internet for health information may potentially influence an individual's decision making to change her health-seeking behaviors. OBJECTIVE The objectives of this s...

The shared model of medical decision making has been proposed as the preferred method of determining patients' treatment. However, agreement may be more difficult to achieve if patients' and clinicians' preferences are polarised. The aim of this paper is to explore how closely patients and clinicians agree in their preferences for different treatment options. Only studies that made quantifiable...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Scenarios are used as the basis from which to evaluate the use of the components of evidence-based practice in decision making, yet there are few examples of a standardized process of scenario writing. The aim of this paper is to describe a step-by-step scenario writing method used in the context of the authors' curriculum research study. METHODS Scenario writing teams ...

I n the world of coding, time is perplexing. On the one hand, time is built into the evaluation and management (E/M) codes, so physicians are told to base their E/M code selection on the history , exam and medical decision-making elements , not on time spent. Times are listed for each service in the CPT manual only as a guideline. On the other hand, CPT lists a variety of codes that are strictl...

The tenets of fuzzy trace theory are summarized with respect to their relevance to health and medical decision making. Illustrations are given for HIV prevention, cardiovascular disease, surgical risk, genetic risk, and cancer prevention and control. A core idea of fuzzy trace theory is that people rely on the gist of information, its bottom-line meaning, as opposed to verbatim details in judgm...