Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Studies show that as time passes, patients find it hard to separate myth from truth in medical information
"'You notice that your grandmother has been taking useless medical treatments, and you're worried,' he said. 'You tell her, 'You know, Granny, shark cartilage doesn't help your arthritis.' You tell her three times to make sure she understands, and she seems to.'
He continued, 'But a few days later you talk to her again and find the warnings have had precisely the opposite effect of what you intended.' This common problem arises, Dr. Skurnik said, because in laying down a memory trace, the human brain seems to encode the memory of the claim separately from its context - who said it, when and other particulars, including the important fact that the claim is not true.
The detailed memory of the experience of learning the information begins to fade almost immediately, and the contextual clues fade faster than the core claim."
"'You notice that your grandmother has been taking useless medical treatments, and you're worried,' he said. 'You tell her, 'You know, Granny, shark cartilage doesn't help your arthritis.' You tell her three times to make sure she understands, and she seems to.'
He continued, 'But a few days later you talk to her again and find the warnings have had precisely the opposite effect of what you intended.' This common problem arises, Dr. Skurnik said, because in laying down a memory trace, the human brain seems to encode the memory of the claim separately from its context - who said it, when and other particulars, including the important fact that the claim is not true.
The detailed memory of the experience of learning the information begins to fade almost immediately, and the contextual clues fade faster than the core claim."
Posted by Kevin |
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Comments:
Kevin, that's interesting, but you leave out the practical application of the article: why doctors should WRITE DOWN what they tell patients.
# posted by 
: 10:46 PM
: 10:46 PM
This seems like an overstating of the research. I'll give the researchers the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was the newspaper who is responsible for most of the distortion. The important quote is:
"Numerous studies over the last few decades have shown that unless people have some countervailing context or information to grab hold of, they tend to regard information that seems familiar as true." It seems that this study proved that this is true for medical claims and that older people don't learn the specific information of true/false versus the younger people so they are left with the familiarity only which biases them towards saying something is true.
I find the statement that the assignment of true or false to each statement being arbitrary interesting since it suggests that this was just a memorization exercise. That older people performed worse in an arbitrary measure of memorization is hardly surprising at all. It would be interesting for them to repeat the experiment with some kind of incentive (probably monetary although a mild, unpleasant shock would probably be more realistic for false health claims) to see if the results were altered once the stakes increased.
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"Numerous studies over the last few decades have shown that unless people have some countervailing context or information to grab hold of, they tend to regard information that seems familiar as true." It seems that this study proved that this is true for medical claims and that older people don't learn the specific information of true/false versus the younger people so they are left with the familiarity only which biases them towards saying something is true.
I find the statement that the assignment of true or false to each statement being arbitrary interesting since it suggests that this was just a memorization exercise. That older people performed worse in an arbitrary measure of memorization is hardly surprising at all. It would be interesting for them to repeat the experiment with some kind of incentive (probably monetary although a mild, unpleasant shock would probably be more realistic for false health claims) to see if the results were altered once the stakes increased.
