Investigators from the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) College of Medicine and the Texas A&M University have just announced the conclusions of a new study they conduct on physician-patient relationships in the nation's healthcare system. They determined that doctors don't really get their patients, in the sense that they are poor judges of the latter's health beliefs. The study seems to indicate that both practitioners and patients could stand a lot to gain if they would just stop for a moment and try to understand each other, e! Science News reports.

“If physicians had a better understanding of their patients' beliefs about health, they could address any misconceptions or differences of opinion they had with the patient regarding the nature, severity, and treatment of their illnesses as well as make treatment recommendations better suited to the patient's life circumstances. Encouraging the patient to be more involved in the consultation by expressing their beliefs and concerns is one way physicians can gain this understanding,” Texas A&M expert Dr. Richard Street says. He was the coauthor of the new investigation, alongside Penn State colleague, professor Paul Haidet.

But the new report also shows that not all hope is lost. Physicians can for example improve their understanding of their patients' beliefs by asking more questions, expressing concerns, or by sharing their own beliefs about how care should be given, and treatments applied. What the team behind the new research did was basically compare the differences between patients' health beliefs and physicians' perception of these beliefs. Details of the investigation appear in the latest online issue of the esteemed Journal of General Internal Medicine, which is published by Springer.

“When doctors take time to listen to what the patient has to say, they can get a wealth of information about the lens through which patients make sense of their health. This can help them be better doctors,” Haidet explains. The team also noticed that the deepest communication appeared between doctors and patients that were of the same ethnicity or race. White doctors, for example, had a harder time understanding the needs and beliefs of African-Americans than physicians of that ethnicity did. The same was true for Hispanics and other races as well.