Earlier today, …
Earlier today, our friends at Visiting Nurse Services of New York tweeted an interesting Wall Street Journal article about doctors’ disagreements over whether to prescribe statins for people who may have elevated cholesterol but who are otherwise healthy. The article presented arguments from two doctors, one who claimed that statins prevent heart disease, and another who said that there is no proof that they prevent heart disease, while they can cause diabetes and other problems.
This got me thinking, since I recently read another article about ACOs, in which many experts agreed that the ACO model can’t be successful unless patients take responsibility for their own health. While it’s true that people need to take care of themselves, after reading the WSJ article, I all I could think was, “how are people supposed to make informed decisions about their care when all the information they get is contradictory?” Asking patients to choose between disagreeing doctors is, for some, a tall order.
Maybe the WSJ is to blame in this instance for its presentation of the issue. It’s one thing to give people a list of pros and cons–that would be useful, in fact–but to present people with one doctor saying “Yes! Take these to prevent heart disease!” and another who says “No! You might get diabetes!” is to confuse most people. These are two diametrically opposed positions–choose one, or the other. What do we want patients to do, flip a coin?
If we want patients to step up and take more responsibility for their own health, maybe we need to do a better job of communicating with them, and give them better information. Imagine your doctor prescribed statins for you. You pick up your prescription on your way home from work, and on the radio, a different doctor is talking about the dangerous side effects of statins, and how they shouldn’t be prescribed to healthy people. Are you feeling anxious yet? Somehow, I don’t think making patients anxious about the medicine they take will motivate people to be more accountable for their health.
Let’s find better ways to inform people so that they can feel better about the choices that they’re making, and in turn, feel better about being responsible for their own well being.
