Physician’s Risk Disclosure

Abstract

As described in chapter two, for the majority of patients who receive therapeutic risk information, the physician is the primary source and additional sources are supplementary. Therefore, an examination of the nature and extent of physician delivered communications is essential to understand how patients learn about their therapies. Studies that have sought to measure the flow of information from doctor to patient have used a variety of methods. Unfortunately, measurement of this complex and dynamic interaction provides only limited insights that are correlated with the particular data gathering technique (Gerbert and Hargreaves, 1986).