Leana Wen’s Who’s My Doctor? campaign is an important step to help health care. She endorses a total transparency manifesto where physicians can describe their sources of revenue and other potential conflicts of interest. It’s an effort to build trust.

We can’t fix health care without patients’ help. A quick look at the numbers for chronic disease are compelling enough– half of Americans have at least one chronic disease, and it accounts for 75% of all health care costs. If we don’t make an impact there, we really won’t make an impact at all.

The trouble with chronic disease is that it depends so heavily on behavior — eat well, exercise, don’t smoke, and take your meds every day. Until we can truly engage patients, we will struggle.

How do we engage patients? How do we get them to literally restructure how they live their lives? How do we get them to agree that they have a disease, that they need to swallow pills every day and risk the side effects, that they need to fit in time for exercise, that they need to arrange with family and friends and coworkers different ways to eat, to not smoke? If we truly want them to get better, we’re truly asking the world. We’re asking them to adopt our world, on our say so. Doctor’s orders.

We simply can’t do it if they don’t trust us.

Read more at: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/12/treat-patients-trust.html

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