The noncompliant doctor

A lot has been written about patient compliance . Lots of doctors ( and pharmaceutical company executives) believe that if patients learn to be compliant and follow the doctor’s instructions , they will get better. Patients are expected to do what the doctor orders them to and doctors believe that patients will follow their instructions.Interestingly, while the traditional  belief was that compliant patients did better than those who did not follow their doctor’s orders, we now know that noncompliant patients are of two different kinds . One doesn’t follow instructions because they cannot afford the prescribed medicines or are unable to understand the doctor’s complex instructions. However, there is a subset of noncompliant patients who actually do even better than compliant patients. They have a mind of their own and when they disagree with the doctor’s advise they will chart out their own path. These patients are not aggressive, but they are assertive, and will not blindly do whatever the doctor tells them to.Just like most doctors expect patients to be compliant, most patients expect their doctors to be compliant as well ! When they request the doctor to prescribe antibiotics for their cold or order an X-ray for their back pain, they expect their doctor to acquiesce. A compliant doctor does what ever the patient asks him to. This is why pharmaceutical companies spend so much money on advertising branded drugs to the public – they know that most doctors wil...
Source: The Patient's Doctor - Category: Obstetricians and Gynecologists Source Type: blogs