What if We Hypothesized Instead of Diagnosed?

The 19th century Romantic poet John Keats was also trained as a physician.  And it's his definition of a "man of achievement" that gives Arabella Simpkin and Richard Schwartzstein their jumping off point in a fascinating essay in the New England Journal of Medicine.  Wrote Keats regarding the necessary quality of such a person: "...when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

How many physicians do you know who would agree with that sentiment?

Simpkin and Schwartzstein go on to make a noble and necessary argument for the place of uncertainty in modern medical practice.  While the proposal is made for the entirety of the profession and the full span of specialties, I was struck by the applicability of the argument to chronic pain management, specifically.

Too often, we focus on transforming a patient’s gray-scale narrative into a black-and-white diagnosis that can be neatly categorized and labeled. The unintended consequence — an obsession with finding the right answer, at the risk of oversimplifying the richly iterative and evolutionary nature of clinical reasoning — is the very antithesis of humanistic, individualized patient-centered care.

This is how non-specific low back pain turns into a 15 year old work comp claim.

The authors make several recommendations, each of which targets the very heart of medical education and clinical practice culture.  We need to cease viewing uncertainty as a threat, but rather embrace it as part of the iterative nature of care.  We need to move away from multiple choice tests in medical education that require definitive answers and instead focus on evaluating medical students' tolerance for uncertainty and ability to posit based on incomplete information.

Perhaps the most daunting recommendation they make, though, is the idea of moving away from concept of diagnosis and instead focusing doctor-patient conversations on the concept of hypothesis.

We can speak about “hypotheses” rather than “diagnoses,” thereby changing the expectations of both patients and physicians and facilitating a shift in culture. This shift may entail discussing uncertainty directly with patients, intentionally reflecting on its origins — subjectivity in the illness narrative, diagnostic sensitivity and specificity, unpredictability of treatment outcomes, and our own hidden assumptions and unconscious biases, to name a few. We can then teach physicians specifically how to communicate scientific uncertainty, which is essential if patients are to truly share in decision making, and we can reduce everyone’s discomfort by reframing uncertainty as a surmountable challenge rather than as a threat.

This requires treating the whole patient.  This requires recognizing the psychological and social contributors to pain perception and tolerance.  This requires seeing through the psychotropic effects of opioids and other addictive medications to get to the root cause issues of chronic pain.  This requires not just patient advocacy, but truly shared decision making.

Of course, this would also require us to move away from the dilapidated and counter-productive world of fee-for-service billing.  This would also require payers and employers to pay for quality, a genuine willingness to pay more dollars for less care (in the traditional sense) and more shared decision making (which will inevitably lead to better outcomes).

So there's a little slice of utopia for you, this Monday morning... with a heaping side helping of reality.

Michael
On Twitter @PRIUM1

Physician Education is Key to Chronic Pain Management

Two themes to which I find myself frequently returning:

1. Primary care doctors are overwhelmed by and ill-equipped to deal with chronic non-cancer pain patients and related long-term opioid therapy; and
2. Mandatory physician education would make a significant difference in the fight against opioid misuse and abuse. 

A paper just published from the University of Missouri puts some data around both of these themes and offers an encouraging path forward on physician training (online link not yet available).

Hariharan Regunath, MD, and some colleagues in the Department of Medicine at the University of Missouri conducted a survey asking 45 internal medicine residents about outpatient chronic non-cancer pain management with opioids.  Some unsettling, but not altogether surprising, results:

• 77.8% reported lack of training in this area
• 86.7% reported lack of consistent documentation from other providers
• 62.2% had at least 1 patient about whom they had concerns for misuse or addiction
• On the bright side, 86.7% believed that focused education could make a difference

So the researchers decided to try some focused education!  After reviewing the results of the initial survey, Dr. Regunath and his team put together a series of educational modules specifically targeting the areas of identified knowledge deficits among the surveyed residents.  

The results were fantastic:

(on a scale of agree to neutral to disagree, % that "agreed" is reported in the table below)

The authors note that despite these compelling results (albeit among a small sample), progress is slow.  "Even at this time, medical education in chronic pain management is still not a mandatory Accrediting Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) component..."  This attitude among the medical education establishment - what's done cannot be undone... or revised, or updated, or improved, even in the midst of a public health crisis - is utterly ridiculous.  

I guess if we can't get mandatory education in place for currently practicing doctors, we might at least start with medical schools and residency programs?  The doctors of the future deserve it.  And so do their patients.   

Michael 

On Twitter @PRIUM1