The shifting of the doctor-patient relationship
By: Diabetes Guru
Tags: Healthcare, Health Technology, Relationships, Technology, Doctors

The shifting of the doctor-patient relationship

You have a doctor’s appointment, you are in a hurry or stuck in a traffic jam and then you realize you can’t make it that day. So you call your doctor or email them that you can’t make it, and would like to get a new appointment. Sure your doctor might get a little upset, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Have you ever stopped for a second and thought about how people managed similar situations twenty years ago?

We can’t deny that human relationships have gone through enormous changes in the last 20 years. For a better understanding of our main topic, let’s first consider some of the major turning points in human communication since the dawn of men. For eons, the fastest way of telecommunication was a guy walking from point A to point B. After the domestication of horses, the speed of telecommunication significantly increased. The postal service — one of the oldest form of telecommunication — has a long history, even in the roman empire, there was a state-mandated postal service, called cursus publicus. The roman system was quite advanced, it had contract-based messengers, stations to rest and change horses. One rider could cover an average of 100 miles a day if conditions were right. It took several weeks to facilitate one-way communication across the roman empire. There are several other examples of telecommunication from the pre-electric era (smoke and drum signals in ancient times, ships communicating with cannons and flags, etc.), but the real evolutionary step came with the industrial revolution. Electricity changed everything. It gave us the potential to communicate at the speed of light at great distances. The first device to utilize this potential was the electrical telegraph in the 19. century. Soon came the invention of the telephone which was a step forward in the quality of communication. Text messages were replaced by real-time vocal communication. However, even greater inventions came with the 20. century. The radio became the first wireless communication method and later on the television allowed the transmission of images. Broadcasting was born. In the 1960s development began on the most important invention of humanity since the fire. The ARPANET was the ancestor of the communication method we know today as the internet. In the 1990s the internet was becoming widely available and in the 2000s it conquered our mobile devices. It changed everything, but mostly the way we communicate in our daily lives. Let’s see how it affected our medical services!

The doctor-patient relationship is a special one. You trust your doctor with details of the most personal aspects of your life, and you have trust in them that they have the knowledge to treat you well. There is confidentiality, mutual work, good news, and bad news. Communication between the doctor and the patient has a key role in maintaining a great doctor-patient relationship. The channel used to facilitate this communication was mostly personal meetings, face to face talk. But with the general shift in our daily communications, this relationship also started to move, became more virtual. We no longer have to visit our doctors to ask about every little thing. We can just write an email, or call them if we are in a tighter working relationship and have that “privilege”. It is becoming easier for our doctors to reach out to us. Sensitive medical data is still a concern and most of the time it’s handled personally, this especially applies to lab results. This is probably that one key element of communication that is resilient to becoming part of our virtual communication spheres.

There is another aspect of this relationship that has gone through changes due to our ever-increasing technocracy. The so-called physician superiority is starting to evaporate. In those times when the general public had little-to-no access to medical knowledge, doctors tended to occupy an “information high ground”. This caused an uneven doctor-patient relationship, positioning the treating doctor above the patient. Accurate medical information is in our pockets. We just grab our smartphones and look up what we want to know. We have entered the information age. Today’s patients have a broader knowledge of their condition and thus reducing the need for the old-fashioned and sometimes condescending explanations of their doctors. This doesn’t mean that the need for medical professionals will decrease overnight. However, shared decision making is becoming easier with those patients whose becoming more insightful in their own condition.

What will the future hold? How this relationship will evolve? Will there be an A.I. so sophisticated that will replace our treating doctors?

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