A blog from the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics (CRB)

Tag: patient-doctor relationship (Page 4 of 4)

Handling mistaken trust when doctors recruit patients as research participants

Patients seem more willing to participate in biobank research than the general public. A possible explanation is the doctor-patient relationship. Patients’ trust in health care professionals might help doctors to recruit them as research participants, perhaps making the task too easy.

That trust in doctors can induce a willingness to participate in research seems threatening to the notion of well-informed autonomous decision making. Can sentiments of trust be allowed to play such a prominent role in these processes?

Rather than dismissing trust as a naïve and irrational sentiment, a new article distinguishes between adequate and mistaken trust, and argues that being trusted implies a duty to compensate for mistaken trust.

The article in Bioethics is written by Linus Johnsson at CRB, together with Gert Helgesson, Mats G. Hansson and Stefan Eriksson.

The article discusses tree forms of mistaken trust:

  1. Misplaced trust: Trusted doctors may lack relevant knowledge of biobank research (for example, about the protection of privacy).
  2. Irrational trust: Patients may be mistaken about why they trust the doctor (the doctor may actually be a form of father or mother figure for the patient).
  3. Inappropriate trust: Patients may inappropriately expect doctors always to play the role of therapists and fail to see that doctors sometimes play the role of research representatives who ask patients to contribute to the common good.

The idea in the paper, if I understand it, is that instead of dismissing trust because it might easily be mistaken in these ways, we need to acknowledge that being trusted implies a duty to handle the potentiality of mistaken trust.

Trust is not a one-sided sentiment: it creates responsibilities in the person who is trusted. If doctors take these responsibilities seriously, the relationship of trust immediately begins to look… well, more trustworthy and rational.

How can mistaken forms of trust be compensated for?

Misplaced trust in doctors can be compensated for by developing the relevant expertise (or by dispelling the illusion that one has it). Irrational trust can be compensated for by supporting the patient’s reasoning and moral agency. Inappropriate trust can be compensated for by nurturing a culture with normative expectations that doctors play more than one role; a culture where patients can expect to be asked by the doctor if they want to contribute to the common good.

If patients’ trust is seen in conjunction with these corresponding moral responsibilities of doctors, the relationship of trust can be understood as supporting the patients’ own decision making rather than undermining it.

That, at least, is how I understood this subtle philosophical treatment of trust and its role when patients are recruited by doctors as participants in biobank research.

Pär Segerdahl

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The economisation of the language of medicine

Two American physicians recently wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine about how they were forced back to school again learning another foreign language. In medical school they learned that measles was called rubeola and itching pruritus. Today they learn that patient is called “customer” (or “consumer”) while doctor and nurse both are called “providers.”

The authors guess that spiralling health care costs drive this “economisation” of their professional language. Economists and politicians believe that the solution to the cost problematic lies in the industrialisation and standardisation of health care. Hospitals are to be run as modern businesses and the traditional language of medicine modified with terms that correspond to the professionals’ new factory functions. Above all, the patient relation is updated as a customer relation.

The two doctors see the economisation of their language as reductionist. It neglects the psychological, spiritual, and humanistic aspects of the relation to the patient. Precisely these aspects made medicine a “calling,” they write. The economisation of medicine concerns not only language, however, but also the organization of work. Doctors are less free to make their own decisions based on their clinical judgment. They are forced to follow manuals written by experts, as if they were on the factory floor following the chief engineer’s scheme.

When I read the article I thought that an alternative way of formulating the problem is in terms of means and ends. The authors’ note that clinical care always had a financial aspect, but the treatment of the patient still was in focus as the doctor’s primary goal. When profit took overhand as the goal, it was seen as a betrayal of the doctor’s calling and worth ridiculing, as in Moliere’s plays. The economisation of medicine turns the relation of means and ends inside out. The end of treating the patient is snatched out of the doctor’s hands and become a means towards other, economic ends. The analysis of the alienation this means is old and it is tempting to hear echoes from another century in the article’s finish, which I cannot avoid paraphrasing: “Doctors and nurses of the world, unite! Through off the language that demeans both patient and professional and that threatens the heart of medicine!”

Simultaneously, one must admit that new generations grow up that do not seem alienated in this new world, but act as self-evident consumers of health care.

Pär Segerdahl

We have a clinical perspective : www.ethicsblog.crb.uu.se

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