When the times get rough, you can ease your patients' minds

As front-line health communicators, primary care physicians can help patients keep frightening news stories in perspective and put risks of life today into context.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. March 24/31, 2003.

Washington -- Think West Nile virus, terrorist attacks with lethal biological or chemical agents, antibiotic resistance.

These dangers are looming in patients' minds, and the need to address them is layered on top of physicians' existing responsibility to educate and advise about well-known health risks.

It's a daunting challenge. And for physicians, meeting it is absorbing more of every office visit. But public health experts say there are common methods that can help tackle these tasks. And taking advantage of them can ease the pressure for both doctor and patient.

Former Surgeon General David Satcher, MD, is quick to underscore one of the first, most basic elements of risk communication: "Understand your audience. Understand their levels of concern and anxieties."

And it is important to keep in mind that patients' responses are triggered by what they are seeing and hearing from other sources. It makes critical the doctors' charge of putting information in context. It is also important to quantify those rare risks that have seized the patient's imagination, said David Weber, MD, professor of medicine/pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Explain, for example, "The risk of contracting anthrax is on the order of being eaten by a shark."

Most patients will calm down when the risk is put into perspective. But people tend to "overperceive" rare risks and to "underperceive" common risks, Dr. Weber said. While the example of the safety of air travel compared with travel by car is well-known, he added, many people who are afraid to fly won't put on a seat belt for a drive to the store.