Do You Believe What the Doctor Tells You?

Doctors are expected to tell close relatives or surrogate decision-makers about the prognosis of patients in critical care. Californian scientists decided to examine how much trust the surrogates put in the doctors’ prognoses, and what they (the surrogates) did with the information. The findings of the study are published in the journal Critical Care Medicine.

The study was done in three sorts of units: the intensive care unit of a public hospital, a tertiary care hospital (i.e. a hospital providing specialist care), and a veteran’s hospital. Interviews were conducted with50 surrogate decision-makers for critically-ill patients.

Overall, 44 of 50 surrogates (80%) were doubtful about doctors’ ability to give an accurate prognosis for critically-ill patients. When asked for the reason for their doubt, surrogates gave one of the 4 following replies: God can alter the course of illness, predicting the future is uncertain, prior experience of inaccurate doctors’ prognoses, and changes in prognosis during an intensive care unit stay.

Although surrogates were largely skeptical about the doctors prognoses, they still wanted to have them; they considered them as useful in making a decision, but not ‘determinative’. And, of course, they can help the surrogates ‘prepare for the worst, and hope for the best’.