Medical Staff

Physicians should not shy away from making recommendations

Hospitalist Leadership Connection, March 14, 2007

A column in the March 5 Boston Globe hails today's patient-centered decision-making process in medicine, but warns that the movement away from physician-dominated decisions may have gone too far.

Instead, physicians should make recommendations for a patient's care, rather than providing options and little guidance in any direction. The writer, Marcia Angell, MD, gives several reasons for the shift, including patient wariness of physicians' financial interest in giving a recommendation and the push to see more patients in a given day.

Angell suggests patients press physicians for guidance when making tough decisions.

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