A doctor’s guidance may reassure us more than we realize – especially if she says she is likely to recommend treatment in her field of expertise, known as “specialty bias.”
Doing research in a real-world health care setting, a Cornell expert and her colleagues have found that when surgeons revealed their bias toward their own specialty, their patients were more likely to perceive them as trustworthy. And patients are more apt to follow their recommendation to have surgical treatment. The research was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study has important implications for professional advisers of any stripe and policymakers who deal with disclosure rules, said Sunita Sah, a physician and assistant professor of management and organizations at Cornell’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management.
Read more of the original article from MedicalXpress.
