Communicative Practices Clinicians Use to Correct Patient Misconceptions in Primary Care Visits

ABSTRACT

To investigate how clinicians correct patient misconceptions, we analyzed 23 video recordings of primary care visits. Analysis focused on operationalizing, identifying, and characterizing clinician corrections, integrating two inductive approaches: microanalysis of clinical interaction and conversation analysis. According to our definition, patient misconception-clinician correction episodes met three essential criteria: (1) the clinician refuted something the patient had said, (2) which the patient had presented without uncertainty, and (3) which contained a proposition that was factually incorrect. We identified 59 such episodes; the patient misconceptions most commonly related to medication issues; fewer than half had foreseeable implications for patients’ future actions. We identified seven clinician correction practices: Three direct practices (displaying surprise, marking disagreement, contradicting the patient) and four indirect practices (presenting the correct proposition, providing explanations, invoking an outside authority, demonstrating with evidence). We found an almost equal distribution of these direct and indirect practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For transcript conventions, see Jefferson (2004).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, University of California Davis Department of Internal Medicine, UC San Diego Denny T. Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion.