Conditioning the patient

It’s not uncommon for patients to come in with unrealistic expectations. There are three that commonly exist:

1. Seriousness
   The patient has no appreciation of the extent of their problems. They think that nothing much is wrong even though they have major problems.

2. Cost
   The patient thinks the treatment will cost much less than it actually does. They’re expecting to spend a couple of hundred dollars when the problem requires thousands of dollars to fix properly.

3. Result
   The patient thinks that the results of treatment will be much better than is reasonably achievable. They are expecting miracles.

In a worst-case scenario the patient has all three unrealistic expectations. That is, they have huge problems which they are unaware of and are expecting a cosmetic miracle for not much money.

What do you do?

First of all, let me tell you what you do not do. You don’t start treatment on a patient until they are in touch with reality.

If you do that, you take the very serious risk of being on the receiving end of a patient complaint.

The correct thing to do is to put the patient through a process that I call “conditioning the patient”. That is you take time to realign the patients expectations with reality.

In some articles over the next few months I’m going to describe exactly how to do this.

Does “conditioning always work?

“Conditioning the patient" works most of the time but not always. The question is what to do in the rare occasion when you cannot get reality through to the patient?

I’d suggest that you do not treat such a patient. You would be opening yourself up to a world of pain.

More on how to “condition the patient” this in future articles.