Re:The Uselessness of Phenylephrine
by henrikschroder on Thursday March 31, 2022 @12:58AM
(#30863958)
In patient satisfaction surveys, treatments like invasive surgery usually ranks very low, while treatments like massage rank very highly. One probably saved your life, the other just felt nice, and yet the second one is rated higher.
It's complete insanity to even being comparing treatments that are so different.
Also getting antibiotics for something gets rated pretty high, even if it did worse than nothing.
This is even true when we're not talking about patient satisfaction. There's definitely conflicts for things like infection control, where what we should probably should be measuring (process measures) conflict with what patient advocacy groups care about and are pushing for (deaths).
Many times, things that a patient wants and would make a patient happy are medically contraindicated and lead to worse outcomes, yet there's immense pressure on clinicians to maintain patient satisfaction metrics.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all; more suggesting that we're currently relying on metrics that are even more perilous than actual clinical outcomes.