Medical Care as Flea Market Bargaining? An International Interdisciplinary Study of Varieties of Shared Decision Making in Physician-Patient Interactions.

Shared decision making (SDM) is a core ideal in the interaction between healthcare providers and patients, but the implementation of the SDM ideal in clinical routines has been a relatively slow process. In a sociological study, 71 interactions between physicians and simulated patients enacting chronic heart failure were video-recorded in China, Germany, the Netherlands, and Turkey as part of a quasi-experimental research design. Participating physicians varied in specialty and level of experience.

Hearts in their hands-Physicians' gestures embodying shared professional knowledge around the world.

The biomedical approach to medical knowledge is widely accepted around the world. This article considers whether the incorporated aspects of physician-patient interaction have become similarly common across the globe by comparing the gestures that physicians use in their interactions with patients. Up to this point, there has been little research on physicians' use of gestures in health-care settings.