串田 秀也

In medical decision-making, doctors have to take into consideration whether patients' expectations can be satisfied while appropriately allocating medical resources. This study explores how recommendations for no further treatment, or gate-closing recommendations, are resisted by patients and how doctors react to resistance in outpatient consultations at a university hospital in Japan. We show how the type of patient resistance shapes doctors' reactions. Problem-focused resistance problematizes the doctor's understanding of the patient's problem or the treatment itself without focusing on the gate-closing aspect of a recommendation, and is met with doctors' persuasion through diagnosis-based accounts. Provider-focused resistance focuses on the gate-closing aspect of a recommendation, and leads doctors to manage their dual roles as patient advocate and resource steward. Two subtypes of provider-focused resistance further shape this work differently. Unwillingness-focused resistance is met with persuasion mainly through institution-based accounts. Unavailability-focused resistance is met with a concession. Doctors systematically respond to patients' resistance in order to reach an agreement during decision-making. They take measures to reconcile their dual roles, and orient themselves toward the implicit rationale of gatekeeping, which has a moral nature.

In medical encounters, doctors sometimes have to convey views of patients’ problems which are not in line with patients’ views and expectations. One such situation in psychiatric consultations is when the patient complains about symptoms which persist in spite of treatment, while the psychiatrist regards the patient’s condition as not serious enough to adjust treatment or has no satisfactory explanations or solutions. Based on an analysis of video-recorded psychiatric consultations in Japan, this study investigates how psychiatrists cope with such situations and shows that they steer the interaction away from the complaints using a series of moves with which they transform the reported symptoms into evidence that supports their view of the patients’ problems. It is argued that psychiatrists strike a balance between the two potentially conflicting goals of respecting patients’ epistemic authority on their symptoms and minimising inappropriate medication increases.

In spite of increasing advocacy for patients' participation in psychiatric decision-making, there has been little research on how patients actually participate in decision-making in psychiatric consultations. This study explores how patients take the initiative in decision-making over treatment in outpatient psychiatric consultations in Japan. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, we analyze 85 video-recorded ongoing consultations and find that patients select between two practices for taking the initiative in decision-making: making explicit requests for a treatment and displaying interest in a treatment without explicitly requesting it. A close inspection of transcribed interaction reveals that patients make explicit requests under the circumstances where they believe the candidate treatment is appropriate for their condition, whereas they merely display interest in a treatment when they are not certain about its appropriateness. By fitting practices to take the initiative in decision-making with the way they describe their current condition, patients are optimally managing their desire for particular treatments and the validity of their initiative actions. In conclusion, we argue that the orderly use of the two practices is one important resource for patients' participation in treatment decision-making.