Would doctors treat themselves the same as patients?

I was reading an article earlier today about how doctors are likely to change their treatment if they were the patient. In the US, a team did a survey of doctors and asked them what their treatment would be for various different medical situations. They then asked the doctors what their treatment would be if they were the patient and the answers were noticeably different.

What I thought was interesting was that the doctors were more likely to recommend dangerous treatments (but with a higher chance of a good outcome) if they were the patient. In contrast, for regular patients they were more likely to advise the safer options that had less risk but were also less likely to result in a symptom free life for the patient.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the doctors are treating themselves better though – in fact it seems as though the doctors were more likely to make the right choice for other people than themselves.

I think this could be for a number of factors. The obvious one is that doctors obviously feel a great responsibility for their patients and would feel very guilty if something went wrong. This means that many are more likely go for safer options to avoid the potential guilt of making the wrong choice.

Even so, I think it’s important that patients are given the chance to choose between the various treatments. A doctor should outline all the potential issues with each treatment and then let the patient decide what level of risk is acceptable for a potentially symptom free life.