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The consultation game

Correspondence to:
Professor G Elwyn
Primary Care Group, University of Wales Swansea, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK; g.elwyn@swansea.ac.uk

Keywords: game theory; medical consultation; doctor-patient relationship; primary health care; decision making

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Game theory and clinical practice seem an unlikely marriage and it may not be obvious how such a combination could improve the quality of clinical consultations. But this area of applied mathematics seems set to reduce some of our quintessential human foibles to a predictable set of behaviours based on what you win and what you lose (forget about how you play the game—at last it’s officially all about winning). Game theory could be a sharp new tool for dissecting the mass of behaviours at play in the medical consultation, a historically paternalistic human interaction that stretches back as far as Hippocrates.

Medicine is a service delivered by a mix of episodic and repeated interactions between humans, medicated by the use of technologies such as tests, drugs and procedures. There is clear evidence that there is communication failure in consultations and that adherence to advice and treatment is . . . [Full text of this article]

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Models of the medical consultation: opportunities and limitations of a game theory perspective

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Qual. Saf. Health Care 2004 13: 461-466. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]