February 26, 2007
For Best Health - Tell The Truth
Carla K. Johnson of the AP recently posted an article that talks to the issue of patients who lie to their doctor.
There's an open secret in medicine: Patients lie.
They lie about how much they smoke and whether they're taking their medicine. They understate how much they drink and overstate how much they exercise. They feign symptoms to get appointments quicker and ask doctors to hide the truth from insurance companies.
And there are consequences for these lies.
"I definitely learned my lesson. I could have ended up in a coma," said Michael Levine, a 28-year-old financial adviser in Los Angeles, who lied to a specialist he saw for a wrist injury. Misguided pride, he said, kept him from mentioning the Xanax he was taking for anxiety. He didn't think the doctor needed to know.
"He wasn't my regular doctor. He was treating my wrist," Levine explained.
The doctor prescribed the pain reliever Vicodin and Levine took it on top of Xanax. The next few days vanished in a cloud of grogginess. Levine slept through ringing phones and alarms and woke up exhausted. His wrist pain was easing, but he could barely function. Eventually, he stopped the Vicodin, returned to the doctor and, under questioning, confessed.
The problem is widespread.
A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found a big gap between what patients said and what they did. Researchers looked at how patients with breathing problems used an inhaler equipped with a device that recorded the date and time of use and compared that with what the patients said.
Seventy-three percent of patients reported using the inhaler on average three times a day, but only 15 percent actually were using it that often. And 14 percent apparently deliberately emptied their inhalers before their appointments to make it look as if they were good patients.