When patients visit a doctor, they have a belief that the doctor would diagnose correctly and provide the most effective medicines that would make them well. But, sometimes they don’t expect the doctors to question them something that they never want to share and thus, they end up lying to the doctors. The reasons why a patient lies could be.
1. They Are Afraid of Being Judged
Many patients would refrain from telling the truth because they think that you would judge them. For example; if you ask a patient about their eating habits and exercising, many would not tell what it actually would be due to the fear of being judged by you.
2. They Never Want to Admit That They Do Anything Wrong
Another reason for lying to the doctors is that the patient doesn’t have enough guts to admit the truth. For example; you might come across some patients who take drugs but when you would ask them about this, they will refuse it straight away because they don’t want their reputation to get down in your eyes.
3. To Avoid the Criticism of Doctor
Patients tend to lie when you ask them about their previous treatments, test reports and were they following the doctor’s prescription or not. They do so to avoid your criticism because there are many doctors who instead of educating the patient, start degrading and criticizing them which makes the patient lose their trust and hope from that doctor.
4. They Are Possibly in a Denial State Themselves
Sometimes patients get some symptoms which never expected and they don’t want to accept that they are of some severe disease so, they enter a denial state. Thus, if you ask them about their symptoms, they would lie because they are scared of getting diagnosed with a serious health condition.
How to Reduce This?
Well, it is a little hard but not impossible to motivate your patients to open up to you honestly. Here is how you can do it.
1. Gain Your Patient’s Trust
The first step to minimize the lying is to establish trust with your patient. For that, you should shake hands with the patients, introduce yourself, make eye contact and start talking calmly and in a friendly tone with the patient in your first meeting with them. Once the patient thinks of you as a decent, friendly and trustworthy doctor, he/she would open up to you honestly about everything.
2. Enlighten Them About the Upshots
If the health condition of the patient seems serious and you still detect some lies from their side, inform them about the upshots that can happen if the diagnosis or treatment failed to be accurate. Also, inform them that you need honest information so that no serious troubles arise. With this news, no patient would want to risk their lives and would definitely start sharing the correct information with you.
Also, it’s a good idea to use best free DICOM viewer Mac to view and keep all the patient’s data which will help you check if patient is telling the truth about previous history. You can search for them by using the phrase ‘best free DICOM viewer’.
Moreover, as a doctor, you should stay very alert while encountering the patients and follow the tips to motivate them to speak out the truth.
