Making health decisions in the face of uncertainty: Let your values be your guide

Follow me on Twitter @DavidAScales My sister texted me recently about my nine-year-old niece. She’d been experiencing joint pain so saw her pediatrician for a check-up. They did some blood tests, which were all normal except one. “Should we be worried?” my sister asked. “I’m no pediatrician, but I’d let it go,” I said. “It’s like seeing a cloud in the sky and asking me if I’m concerned about a hurricane.” Should we worry about and investigate every cloud when most don’t end up being a passing storm, let alone a hurricane? Many patients are like my sister, looking for certainty that everything is normal, and if not, a concrete diagnosis. “Part of the reason why the culture of medicine prizes [certainty] is people come to expect it in us,” Steven Hatch, the author of Snowball in a Blizzard: A Physician’s Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine, said in an interview. Most doctors, and many patients, have a low tolerance for uncertainty Yet while most doctors agree that medical uncertainty is ubiquitous and inevitable, it might not initially seem that way when you go to the doctor. Physicians are often happy to oblige a patient’s quest for certainty. Some negative tests might reassure them, and sometimes they might reassure us. We’ve all heard stories about the doctor who didn’t test for something and cancer was later discovered. That’s because physicians don’t tolerate uncertainty well. “The culture of medicine evinces a deep-rooted unwillingne...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Health care Managing your health care Source Type: blogs