14 DAY TRIAL // A team of psychologists at the University of Auckland (UA) and the King’s College London (KCL) Institute of Psychiatry determined in a new research that the way patients perceive their diseases is critical to whether they will get better or not, as well as for how long the recovery process will take.
This is not the first field where perception is admitted to be more important than reality, experts say. Some have been taking the same approach in marketing and politics for decades, with amazing results.
What the new study demonstrates is that the same is true for diseases as well. Doctors and patients alike have known anecdotally that being positive is winning half the battle, but very few practical evidence to support this point of view have ever been made available.
There are numerous factors influencing the path an illness takes, including the amount and quality of social support a patient gets, the other medical conditions they have, the amount of stress they're subjected to and so on.
The research team demonstrates that the outcome of illnesses depends just as much on the way the patients themselves look at their conditions. The research was conducted by UA psychologist Dr. Keith Petrie and KCL colleague John Weinman.
Together, the researchers analyzed the existing literature on illness perception, and published details of what they came across in the February issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
According to the research, there are some experts who believe that perception plays an even bigger role in the outcome of the disease than the severity of the medical condition itself, PsychCentral reports.
One of the possible explanations for all of this is that people's perceptions about their illnesses is what guides a host of other behaviors, including acceptance towards what is happening, the willingness to follow through with the medication plans their doctors laid out, and so on.
For example, “a doctor can make accurate diagnoses and have excellent treatments but if the therapy doesn’t fit with the patient’s view of their illness, they are unlikely to keep taking it,” Petrie explains.
Based on the new data, investigators will be able to piece together new types of approaches to prescribing therapies, which will ensure that as many people as possible follow through on their medication.