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General practice consultations: is there any point in being positive?
Abstract
A group of 200 patients who presented in general practice with symptoms but no abnormal physical signs and in whom no definite diagnosis was made were randomly selected for one of four consultations: a consultation conducted in a "positive manner," with and without treatment, and a consultation conducted in a "non-positive manner," called a negative consultation, with and without treatment. Two weeks after consultation there was a significant difference in patient satisfaction between the positive and negative groups but not between the treated and untreated groups. Similarly, 64% of those receiving a positive consultation got better, compared with 39% of those who received a negative consultation (p = 0.001) and 53% of those treated got better compared with 50% of those not treated (p = 0.5).
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Citations
Cited by
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Placebo interventions for all clinical conditions
Hróbjartsson, A., & Gøtzsche, P. C. (2010) · Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews · doi:10.1002/14651858.cd003974.pub3 · Cited by 777
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Kroenke, K. (2003) · International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research · doi:10.1002/mpr.140 · Cited by 624
The double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial
Kaptchuk, T. J. (2001) · Journal of Clinical Epidemiology · doi:10.1016/s0895-4356(00)00347-4 · Cited by 595
Metadata
- Authors
- Thomas, K. B.
- Venue
- BMJ
- Publisher
- BMJ
- Published
- 1987-05-09
- Volume
- 294
- Issue
- 6581
- Pages
- 1200-1202
- ISSN
- 0007-1447 (ISSN-L)
- 0959-8138
- 1468-5833
- OpenAlex
- W2158491620
- Cited by
- 419
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 10.17
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
