For Better Treatment, Doctors and Patients Share the Decisions
2014
This podcast is about the use of words used by doctors such as “very small risk, very unlikely, very rare, very likely, and high risk.” One investigator found that only about 20 percent of physicians surveyed stated they were comfortable using numbers and explaining probabilities to patients. Moreover, patients might interpret that word to represent a very different probability.
The interview engaged two physicians who sought to improve the involvement of shared decision-making with patients by providing them with online, written, and visual information. Their goal was to make risk understandable and to bridge the gap between percent probabilities and words.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also likes numbers and urges drug companies to give numerical values for risk, and to avoid the use of vague terms such as “rare, infrequent, and frequent.” Access the FDA report. The European Medicines Agency (a part of the European Union) has matched a scale of terms – “very common, common, uncommon, rare and very rare” – with numerical definitions for each of those five levels of frequency.
- Access Podcast: For Better Treatment, Doctors and Patients Share the Decisions (~9 min)
- Access Transcript: For Better Treatment, Doctors and Patients Share the Decisions
This podcast was one of six in a series that focused on how we interpret and communicate probability and uncertainty, produced by All Things Considered, NPR.
Extracted from accompanying podcast description.
For Better Treatment, Doctors and Patients Share the Decisions
Source:
For Better Treatment, Doctors and Patients Share the Decisions. All Things Considered, NPR 2014; Jul 24. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/07/24/333719559/for-better-treatment-doctors-and-patients-share-the-decisions