Everyone has had a doctor with a terrible "bedside manner," a set of behaviors involving things like not listening, being in a hurry, giving bad news in an insensitive, uncaring manner, etc. [Paste picture of TV's Dr. House here]. We typically do not like these doctors, no matter how quickly they help us get well.
Now there is some evidence that doctors with a good bedside manner actually help their patients get well more quickly. According to research by David Rakel and colleagues, reported in the Family Medicine article, Practitioner Empathy and the Duration of the Common Cold - "Patients with empathic doctors recover more quickly. The amount of empathy and attentiveness shown by doctors to their patients really does matter... (P)atients who rate their doctor as highly empathic recover more quickly from a cold."
In fact, their research showed that empathy (feeling what another person is feeling) shortened the length of their cold about the same length as anti-viral drugs.
Humorous comment by researchers at this point: "without the nausea and diarrhea of the drug."
At first, I found it humorous that the "empathetic" doctors in this study had to get special acting lessons from professional actors on how to "come across as sympathetic and understanding." The other doctors just basically acted like themselves.
Then I remembered that I had to be taught how to act "therapeutic" in my graduate counseling training.
Uh, oh. The article says, "It was only those participants who gave their doctors a perfect empathy score who showed improved recovery." What's wrong with that? No doctor has a perfect bedside manner. That is the difference between research in a lab, and the real world.
November 25, 2009
November 22, 2009
Knowing Right Isn't Doing Right
"Moral" is not "what you feel good after." If I have been taught that what is bad is good, when I do bad I will feel good. I feel good even though I have done bad. (See yesterday's post.)
One of the criticisms of both Jean Piaget's and Lawrence Kohlberg's research is that they focused on knowing right and wrong. But knowing right and doing right are not the same thing. We are really interested in people's behaviors, not in their thoughts about their behaviors, or what they know.
Have you ever done something that you knew was wrong to do, but you did it anyway?
Stop shaking your head "no." I know that you have, because you are human. Humans do not always follow our own values.
You know better than you do. We are still working on how to get people to do what they know is the right thing to do.
That is why, after years of an educational campaign, costing the government millions of dollars, college students still don't use condoms when they have sex (to protect against disease and pregnancy).
If you ask the question, "Is using a condom a good idea when having sex?" college students say, "Yes." But, when you ask the question, "The last time you had sex did you use a condom?" the answer is "No."
Attitudes do not predict behavior.
One of the criticisms of both Jean Piaget's and Lawrence Kohlberg's research is that they focused on knowing right and wrong. But knowing right and doing right are not the same thing. We are really interested in people's behaviors, not in their thoughts about their behaviors, or what they know.
Have you ever done something that you knew was wrong to do, but you did it anyway?
Stop shaking your head "no." I know that you have, because you are human. Humans do not always follow our own values.
You know better than you do. We are still working on how to get people to do what they know is the right thing to do.
That is why, after years of an educational campaign, costing the government millions of dollars, college students still don't use condoms when they have sex (to protect against disease and pregnancy).
If you ask the question, "Is using a condom a good idea when having sex?" college students say, "Yes." But, when you ask the question, "The last time you had sex did you use a condom?" the answer is "No."
Attitudes do not predict behavior.
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