The Challenge of Ambiguity
The popular television show House in which talented doctors attempt to diagnose patients with complicated symptoms portrays the ambiguous nature of medicine: No matter how much medical preparation doctors have, obvious and simple diagnoses are not always possible.
The level of ambiguity with which health care providers, patients, and family members are faced clearly serves as a major source of conflict. In addition to dealing with the ambiguous nature of illness, providers also face uncertainty about their patients, including their communication preferences, their expectations, and their lifestyles. Reducing this uncertainty not only requires more time than providers can allocate but also violates typical interactional norms of privacy and self-disclosure. Patients experience this ambiguity as well, having less medical knowledge and experience and often knowing little about their provider’s background, credentials, and decisionmaking methods. Moreover, ambiguity for providers and patients may change over the course of disease management, as health is a dynamic state and treatments change in effectiveness, availability, and appeal. Family members similarly encounter ambiguity as they attempt to advocate for the patient, navigate health care organizational policies and procedures, turn over their primary care giving role, and assist the patient in adjusting to his or her new environment or reality. Finally, the changing mechanisms of health care delivery in the United States present challenges for providers, patients, and health care organizations. Federal and state policies, insurance revisions, emerging technologies, and so on may simultaneously reduce and increase ambiguity for patients and providers. Given the unique relationship between providers and patients, it is not surprising that each party needs to acquire a sophisticated set of communication skills to effectively negotiate this relationship. While many of the articles reviewed here point to ambiguity as a source of conflict, future research should emphasize this framework and seek to answer questions about how providers, health care organizations, and patients/family members effectively address and reduce ambiguity. Since many of the studies conducted have examined microcommunication in highly specific contexts, it would be particularly fruitful to conduct a meta-analysis or replicate previous studies of ambiguity in health care contexts to develop a set of generalizable recommendations for reducing and managing ambiguity.
More on the topic The Challenge of Ambiguity:
- Summary of Provider, Patient, and Family Member Conflict
- IMPLICATIONS FOR TRAINING
- Oetzel John, Ting-Toomey Stella. The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice. SAGE Publications,2013. — 912 p., 2013
- PRACTICAL LIMITATIONS OF THE CONCEPT
- VI. THE INSTITUTIONAL APPROACH AND PRIVATE LAW REGIMES
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