Do you need more time with your doctor?

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‘If my doctor would spend more time with me, I could get round to asking about that toe pain, my bum knee, my ennui.’

Don’t be so sure -- all you might get are more minutes draped in a silly paper robe.

The Cochrane Collaboration, an organization that evaluates medical research, just reviewed five studies in which doctors were assigned patient consultations of different lengths and the longer and shorter consults were then compared. We read about it here, at the website for the Center for the Advancement of Health.

The conclusion: Except for blood-pressure readings, and more time spent on health promotion issues such as admonishments to give up smoking, ‘doctors did not discuss more problems, prescribe more drugs, run more tests, make more referrals or do more examinations when they had a few additional minutes with patients,’ the Center for the Advancement of Health article says. Psychological issues -- often brushed over in rushed consultations -- were not discussed more often.

Of course, the little bit of extra time may have been spent building rapport, or exploring an identified medical problem more thoroughly. But if so, this didn’t make any difference to levels of patient satisfaction, the review found. (You can bet that has been a topic of discussion among the proliferation of medical blogs written by doctors these days -- on which subject, if you want to check out an article on how such blogs might compromise patient privacy, go here.)

Doctor stress wasn’t measured.

Caveats, according to the Cochrane report, included the fact that the added time to consultations wasn’t huge -- one study, for example, compared consult lengths of 5.5, 6.4, 6.7 7, and 7.9 minutes -- and the other studies were fairly similar in that regard. Maybe these slight changes in doctor-patient face time weren’t enough to make a difference.

The studies were also short-term, so there’s no way to know whether those extra moments spent reminding a patient to get out and exercise, eat more broccoli or cut back on the ciggies would actually add up to a healthier patient long-term. For example, studies have shown that when doctors tell patients to stop smoking, the patients are more likely to quit.

-- Rosie Mestel