I definitely think there may be some biases on the part of hospitalists,” says Ashish Boghani, MD, chief of the hospitalist service at Highland Hospital, Rochester, N.Y. As a young physician, he noticed some bias in his own thoughts and behaviors.
“But as I got more and more experienced,” he says, “if I was told by another provider that someone was a difficult patient, I left that outside the door. When I go into a patient’s room the first time, I start fresh—no matter what I read on the chart or heard from any staff or colleagues. … And it usually turns out that once you approach it like that … the situation turns out differently.”
In other words, if a physician doesn’t approach a patient with the bias of someone else’s interpretation, that patient will not necessarily be perceived as difficult. What about a physician’s own biases?
Personal Biases
“A lot of a hospitalists’ interactions with patients are colored by our own experiences,” says Bilal Ahmed, MD, associate program director for the residency program and associate professor of clinical medicine, University of Rochester School of Medicine. For example, “when physicians see a patient who has COPD or cancer and is smoking,” he says, “there may be this thought at the back of their minds that this is something they brought upon themselves. [In that case] the empathy that you feel for that person may go down just a notch, which is a very human response.”
Dr. Ahmed often discusses remaining nonjudgmental with his residents. “But it is not that easy to always practice it, so it kind of creeps back in,” he says.
In particular, biases against obese patients are common and have been shown to affect a physician’s practice style. Research published in 2005 demonstrated that with regard to obese patients, poorer physical health, a lower level of education, and a lower income level were significantly associated with the doctor spending more time on technical tasks during primary care medical encounters, rather than engaging in educational interactions with these patients that encouraged health.1, 2
In a study of 62 severely overweight and 29 normal weight adolescents, satisfaction with affective aspects of the patient-physician relationship was negatively correlated with body mass index score.3 And although these were studies involving primary care, a physician’s specialty is irrelevant when it comes to these very human responses, says Howard Beckman, MD, clinical professor of internal medicine and family medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.
In the once- or twice-monthly conversations Dr. Ahmed holds with his residents about the topic of obesity, “we look at the social, cultural, genetic, metabolic, and other components so we can understand that it is not just that the person is eating a lot,” he explains. “It’s multifactorial, and [there is] a complex set of facts that leads a person to be where they are.”
What’s Behind Bias?
“The areas where we judge other people may be just the areas where we are doing these things ourselves,” says Dr. Beckman. “Part of why we are the way we are with certain patients is that we fear that we may be like that person, and we want to blame them to let ourselves off the hook.”
Many types of patients may trigger an individual physician’s dislike or aversion, including passive patients, patients who smoke, overweight patients, depressed patients, patients who abuse various substances, non-adherent patients, whiny patients, passive-aggressive patients, and elderly patients.
“The movement in medicine is for insightful reflection about what the physician brings into the room,” says Dr. Beckman.