“No better” was the message I got last week about a sore toe, a stubborn cough and a case of C. Difficile diarrhea. All three messages were false alarms, misleading missives, inadequate information or whatever you want to call it.
After a few more questions, all three patients turned out to actually be doing much better than the messages suggested.
The octogenarian with the sore toe, which looked like gout to me, told me the exquisite pain she had experienced from the lightest touch was gone, the throbbing had subsided, and now there was just a strange itching deep inside her toe. The swelling was almost gone, and she didn’t even flinch when I squeezed her toe. The two days of prednisone I had prescribed really seemed to have helped her. And, her uric acid level had come back elevated.
The man with a cough back in April had actually almost stopped coughing after a ten day course of antibiotics for his cough, sinus congestion and postnatal drip. But his symptoms had gradually started to come back. He hadn’t refilled his prescription as I had told him he could, but decided to give it more time. Now he was almost back at square one. I told him to take another round of the antibiotic and expect to see him do well.
The poor woman with clostridium colitis had improved significantly, but wasn’t quite back to normal. Her probiotic order had stopped when her metronidazole stopped and she turned out to have a fondness for tall glasses of cold milk. I had her restart her lactobacillus and give up the milk, and within two days her stools were formed.
In all three cases, one or two simple followup questions provided information that the prescribed treatments had actually worked fairly well. But in all three scenarios, either the patient or the person who took the message seemed to have an all-or-nothing mindset, almost like a “true or false” quiz, or “complains of/denies” click boxes in our electronic medical record.
This is a problem in healthcare today: Information is expected to be “discrete”, “structured”, or straightforward. But people and diseases are usually more nuanced than that. And without the nuances provided by a real patient narrative, we risk making deleterious treatment decisions.
Medical practice is not usually so algorithmic that simple yes or no answers can guide our treatment decisions. One person’s yes is another person’s no, depending on their expectations and a host of psychological factors.
Our job is to listen to the narrative and, only then, decide whether to follow the “yes” or the “no” arm of whatever algorithm we are trying to apply.
In this era of EMR click boxes and team based care, there is a real danger of seeking simple answers without listening to patients long enough to understand what they are trying to tell us.
We learned this in medical school and residency. EMR people and office staff didn’t. We need to pause and think like doctors before we give knee-jerk responses to seemingly simple messages.