Clinical Management Of The Belatedly Compliant Patient
The Midlife Midwife Returns
Readers may recall Looking At Patient Compliance From Both Sides Now, the 11 April 2007 AlignMap post that introduced The Midlife Midwife, who in Patient Compliance had compared her own resistance to following her dentist’s prescription for ongoing care of her teeth (e.g., flossing, regular exams) with the recalcitrance of her own patients to adopt her recommendations for preventive health care (such as pap smears, mammograms, and exercise).
At that time, she had also decided to undergo the necessary dental work she had deferred for seven years.
The Sequel
It turns out that, as is often the case in healthcare, the decision to undergo treatment was not the end of the story. In Patient Compliance ACT 2, we learn that efforts to prepare her tooth for a crown led to an exacerbation of problems and the necessity of a root canal. Having previously endured more than my share of ministrations by dentists of widely varying degrees of skill,1 I am sympathetic to Midwife’s anxiety about dental work and the pain she is currently undergoing.
The good news, however, is that Midlife Midwife stubbornly persists in her determination to examine her own healthcare experiences for clues into how to better manage the patients in her practice:
Even more impressive, she has translated these considerations into behavioral changes:
Midlife Midwife’s new, more positively focused response to the belatedly compliant patient is along the lines of
And, since I couldn’t improve on her own conclusion, I’ll close my post with her final words:
Credit Due Department: Atop this post is a photo of an Iowa dentist, circa 1895, from the State Historic Society, Iowa City.
Footnotes
- ”Dentists of widely varying degrees of skill” is, of course, code for “Some of the dentists I’ve seen were incompetent clods with more than a tad of the stereotyped sadistic streak; thank goodness the dentist I see now knows what he’s doing and is a nice guy to boot.” [back]
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