Patient perceptions of communication practices of traditional and allopathic providers

Purpose: Use of complementary, alternative and integrative medicine (CAIM) is growing. One reason for this may be related to differences in the quality of patient-provider interactions. A study was conducted to assess patients' perceptions of traditional and allopathic healthcare provider communication styles, and whether any specific communication component was viewed as more important.

Methods: Traditional East Asian Medicine (TEAM), a whole systems provider-based CAIM modality was selected for comparison with allopathic care. Data was collected from a convenience sample of 222 participants who had received treatment from a traditional TEAM provider at least once. An 88-item survey was employed, which included 20 communication items.

Results: There was a significant difference on all communication items with traditional providers perceived as communicating more effectively. This included listening carefully, answering questions satisfactorily, providing enough information about the problem, taking the patients' views into consideration, offering an explanation of the problem, offering lifestyle advice, and related items including spending enough time, providing emotional support, showing optimism for the treatment, and helping patients feel in control of their healing process. A regression to predict satisfaction with acupuncture use found two items to be significant – perceived efficacy of the treatment and the traditional provider answering questions to the patients' satisfaction (p=.01 and .015 respectively).

Conclusion: Communication style appears to contribute to patient healthcare satisfaction. Taking time to answer patient questions was specifically found to be a significant predictor in this sample. Perceived communication differences may be one factor influencing patient healthcare decision making related to the use of CAIM.