Like doctors, patients can be influenced by financial incentives.
A group of dieters were either paid $3 per day, plus incentives for meeting certain goals, or were eligible to compete in a cash lottery for $10 to $100 per day, if they lost weight.
Care to guess what happened?
To absolutely no one’s surprise, patients who were in the group offered more money lost more weight.
Paying patients to maintain good health is not a new concept, and has been tried in areas of chronic medication compliance and smoking cessation.
It is somewhat of a sad commentary that we have to resort to paying patients to do what’s best for themselves.
Related posts:
- Paying for your obesity
- Does counseling kids to lose weight and increase exercise work?
- Tell patients to stop smoking, or get sued
- Telling a patient to lose weight = "Fat hatred"
- Paying doctors
- How much Nintendo Wii would you have to play to lose weight?
- When a laptop tries to lose weight
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The study also showed that the participants gained a significant portion of the weight back as soon as they stopped being paid.
Sad indeed.
not such a good way to keep costs down though??
well, aside from a question begging notion of what’s best for one’s self (as a right/libertarian leaning blogger, shouldn’t you believe in revealed preference?)
also this.
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