It just seems natural to me.

Some people think e-patients are people who use the internet for healthcare purposes. 10-15 years ago that was pretty accurate, because being an internet researcher was pretty unusual then. But today I tell people e-patients are the empowered and engaged ones – and that naturally includes being online about it, because as Pew data shows, people are pretty much online about everything these days.

So calling someone an e-patient for using the Web is sorta like calling them a shoe-patient for using shoes to get to the doctor. It’s just what people do. :–)

Anyway (hi Bill) I know people who assume they’ll be told everything they need to know, but as Cindy points out, that’s a constant balancing act for the professional. (I know Bill, and he’s very good at explaining very complex science in very simple terms. He should be a doctor, or a patient translator, or some such!)

Best,
Jocelyn

I don’t know if the doctor did a good job warning her about potential side effects or not. You see Bill, Participatory Medicine is more than a good doctor with ethical values, it’s also a patient who is willing to listen, research, and make wise health decisions. The whole team has to participate.

Two years later my friend is relatively pleased with the outcome of her surgery, but for six month to a year after, she was afraid she’d made a bad decision with an irreversible outcome. At that point, she was wishing she’d had all the facts and acted on them. She would have loved having four pairs of stlyin’ glasses.

C~

The view of traditional health care is that clinicians are responsible for the bulk, if not all, decision making in the health care relationship…What are the implications for training health professionals to interact with a growing population of active, informed, networked patients?

I empathize with doctors in that they must constantly filter, in their personal and professional judgment, what information to share with patients. There is a continuum here from situations where a doctor omits critical information (unethical) to situations where a doctor makes a judgment call in choosing how (or whether) to share what he or she happens to consider relatively unimportant information.

In a perfect world, we would not need this thing called ‘participatory medicine’. The reality is that we need it to counteract the effects of residual patriarchal medicine (where an old school doctor might argue that it would be unethical to ‘worry my pretty little head’ over unlikely outcomes) as well as things like medication errors. Harm is not always intentional. As patients, we have a real need to protect ourselves while we work with doctors to create a medical system that is more sensitive to the needs and preferences (not to mention, long term health outcomes) of patients.

You were seeing elective surgery, who had risk factors you were unaware of, these were explained to you, the doctor expressed his opinion and allowed you to make an informed choice. Bottom line you had a good outcome and were involved in the process. For any elective procedure this is how it should be.

You are worried about doctors at specialty clinics and whether they are driven move by revenue generation or patient care. If a doctor felt that the benefits of the procedure out weighed the risks and failed to advise you of the risks, you would not have known enough to question his judgment.

Your concerns are justified, but the key differences as I see it, are the ethical values of the doctors and not the patient’s participation.