Ten Questions to Ask Your Doctor?

The blog, Shots, posted a question primer to prepare patients for medical office visits with their doctors. A reaction to this appeared on Glass Hospital, where John Schumann offered his own wry version of the question list. My less wryer, and more drier response appears below.

While I agree with Shots that education is power, a closer look at the question list demonstrates that the intent to educate may obfuscate instead.

First, the post is entitled, Ten Questions to Ask Your Doctor, suggesting that patients arrive at their physician’s office armed with 10 inquiries spanning a spectrum of medical knowledge and philosophy including medical treatment strategy, physician qualifications, risks of treatment, medical treatment alternatives, choice of hospitals and even how to spell the names of their medications. (I guess Shots believes that spelling counts!)

Some of the questions sound reasonable, but could patients make sense out of the answers? For example, Shots suggests asking which hospital is best for my needs? Patients often are focused on the choice of hospital, when they should be more interested in which physicians will be caring for them. While the hospital matters, it’s much more important who will be performing your surgery, then where it will take place. Are patients equipped to evaluate hospital quality anyway? Is a good reputation or a shiny exterior a true surrogate for medical quality? Patients often have a negative view of a hospital based on an isolated anecdote, which they may not have even experienced first-hand.

Another suggested question is how many times have you done this procedure? Will this provide useful information for patients? I agree that for many medical procedures, a higher case volume means a lower risk of complications. But, will it enlighten a patient to know that the gastroenterologist has performed 2000 colonoscopies or 5000 or 10,000? Better questions, which can’t be quantitatively answered, would be how many times have you done this procedure well, or, how many of your procedures were truly medically necessary? I object to Shots’ version of the ‘how many’ question which simplistically reduces medically quality measurement to a check-off form, paying homage to the deities who gave life to the pay-for-performance beast. What really counts can’t be counted. Paradoxically, what can be counted, will count.

In addition, if you bring your doctor the 10 question list, be prepared for some frustration when your office visit ends and you’ve only covered the first 3 items on the list. There may not be time left for you to discuss the issue that brought you t see your doctor in the first place. It may take a few visits and a fair amount of dialogue for you to understand your physician’s philosophy and style of medical practice. This important information can’t be acquired by taking a multiple choice test or answering a series of questions.

The question list on the blog Shots is a guide that needs to be prioritized. You simply can’t cover them all in a single visit, and you shouldn’t have to. Experienced physicians know that patients often want to cover every last medical concern and we will often begin a visit with a question from our own ‘top ten list’. What are the 1 or 2 issues that we need to cover today?

Any questions?