personal traits, in addition to our technical clinical skills, it is difficult to get beyond tooth repairs with many of our patients.
While some people give up at this point and relent to a doctor’s
need to direct and tell people how to be healthier, I did not. I realized this style wasn’t working with half of my patients or half of my
team. In other words, my batting average wasn’t as good as
expected. The end outcome of whole health did not occur often
enough for my competitive spirit. I was not helping people change
their behaviors nor was I achieving my goal of finding answers to
deeper questions.
Oh, I wanted my way to work — so badly, because it is much easier
to direct people. Telling people what to do is so much easier than
helping them through the long, messy process of finding the
answers themselves. Time constraints make a directive approach
tempting, and the title of doctor often does the same.
Furthermore, why wouldn’t patients follow our directions and recommendations? We just spent years and years learning how to
treat patients. We are the presumed experts. It’s dumbfounding as
a doctor to rationalize why a patient will not follow our advice. It’s
frustrating at the least and infuriating at the most.
With this mentality, the opportunity for blame seeps in. The easy
route is to blame our patients for not following directions. Then,
we can wash our hands of any responsibility for better patient outcomes. As dentists (and many healthcare professionals), we are
actually rewarded for noncompliant patients: without compliance,
patients get more cavities and have more disease. This disease must
be treated with procedures, and we get paid to complete procedures.
Can we be punished for patients’ poor choices and noncompliance?
I don’t think that is a fair route either because patients must have
a stake in their own health. It truly must be a team approach in
achieving total health.
I do believe the problem is two-fold. It is a combination of errors
on both sides. As doctors, we err by not asking better questions to
elicit better answers. We also err in our abilities to listen for the
underlying meaning patients tell us. Patients do not respond the
same way. The “textbook” patient ́