Avoidance of anticipated regret: the ordering of prostate-specific antigen tests.

Objective: When making decisions, people are known to try to minimize the regret that would be provoked by unwanted consequences of these decisions. The authors explored the strength and determinants of such anticipated regret in a study of physicians' decisions to order prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests.

Methods: 32 US and 33 French primary care physicians indicated the likelihood they would order a PSA for 32 hypothetical men presenting for routine physical exams.

Why do primary care physicians in the United States and France order prostate-specific antigen tests for asymptomatic patients?

Purpose: To understand why many primary care physicians in the United States and France order prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests routinely for their asymptomatic male patients despite "evidence-based" recommendations.

Methods: Thirty-two U.S.

Does choosing a treatment depend on making a diagnosis? US and French physicians' decision making about acute otitis media.

Background: The classic sequential processing model of clinical decision making-in which the treatment choice follows and depends on the diagnostic judgment-may in some cases be replaced by a processing model in which the treatment choice depends on an independent assessment of the diagnostic and other cues. The aim of this study was to determine which processing model would better describe physicians' treatment choices in a simulated clinical task.

Methods: Seventy-five US and French primary care physicians were presented twice, in a different order, with the same set of 46 scenarios of 15-month-old children suspected of having acute otitis media (AOM).

Do parents and physicians differ in making decisions about acute otitis media?

Objectives: We wanted to discover how parents differ from physicians in making decisions about how to treat a child who may have acute otitis media (AOM).

Study Design: We used questionnaires that required participants to judge the probability of AOM or choose treatment for 2 sets of 46 paper scenarios of hypothetical children aged 15 months who might have AOM, and they subsequently rated the importance of individual cues and described their attitudes and opinions related to health care and AOM.

Population: Convenience samples of 19 US family physicians, 35 French generalists, 21 French pediatricians, 52 US parents, and 86 French parents were included.