ArticleHealth expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy2013
Physicians' attitudes about communicating and managing scientific uncertainty differ by perceived ambiguity aversion of their patients.
Article in Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Defining and Measuring Diagnostic Uncertainty in Medicine: A Systematic Review.Journal of general internal medicine · 2018Pooled it
- Managing diagnostic uncertainty in primary care: a systematic critical review.BMC family practice · 2017Pooled it
- Trial
- Point-of-Care Multiplex NAAT for Acute Pharyngitis in the Urgent Care: Detection Patterns, Associated Antimicrobial Prescribing, and Stakeholder Perceptions.Open forum infectious diseases · 2026Article
- The impact of uncertainty on disclosure of prenatal exome sequencing results: A vignette study among medical students.PloS one · 2026Article
- Prenatal genomic sequencing: Navigating uncertainty.Seminars in perinatology · 2025Review
- How Do Paediatricians Manage Comfort with Uncertainty in Clinical Decision-Making.Perspectives on medical education · 2024Article
- Uncertainty in healthcare and health decision making: Five methodological and conceptual research recommendations from an interdisciplinary team.Journal of behavioral medicine · 2023Review
- Article
- Fostering uncertainty tolerance in anatomy education: Lessons learned from how humanities, arts and social science (HASS) educators develop learners' uncertainty tolerance.Anatomical sciences education · 2023Article
- "I wish that there was more info": characterizing the uncertainty experienced by carriers of pathogenic ATM and/or CHEK2 variants.Familial cancer · 2022Article
- Decision Thresholds for Medical Tests Under Ambiguity Aversion.Frontiers in health services · 2022Article
- Context and general practitioner decision-making - a scoping review of contextual influence on antibiotic prescribing.BMC family practice · 2021Article
- On the effect of uncertainty on personal vaccination decisions.Health economics · 2021Article
- A scoping review of practice recommendations for clinicians' communication of uncertainty.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2021Article
- Does diagnostic uncertainty increase antibiotic prescribing in primary care?NPJ primary care respiratory medicine · 2021Article
- Incorporating patient and caregiver feedback into lung transplant referral guidelines for individuals with cystic fibrosis-Preliminary findings from a novel paradigm.Clinical transplantation · 2020Article
- Physician-identified barriers to and facilitators of shared decision-making in the Emergency Department: an exploratory analysis.Emergency medicine journal : EMJ · 2019Article
- Lung transplant referral for individuals with cystic fibrosis: Cystic Fibrosis Foundation consensus guidelines.Journal of cystic fibrosis : official journal of the European Cystic Fibrosis Society · 2019Review
- Uncertainty related to multigene panel testing for cancer: a qualitative study on counsellors' and counselees' views.Journal of community genetics · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundMedical interventions are often characterized by substantial scientific uncertainty regarding their benefits and harms. Physicians must communicate to their patients as part of the process of shared decision making, yet they may not always communicate scientific uncertainty for several reasons. One suggested by past research is individual differences in physicians' tolerance of uncertainty. Relatedly, an unexplored explanation is physicians' beliefs about their patients' tolerance of uncertainty.
designTo test this possibility, we surveyed a sample of primary care physicians (N = 1500) and examined the association between their attitudes about communicating and managing scientific uncertainty and their perceptions of negative reactions to uncertainty by their patients. Physician perceptions were measured by their propensity towards pessimistic appraisals of risk information and avoidance of decision making when risk information is ambiguous--of uncertain reliability, credibility or adequacy, known as 'ambiguity aversion'.
resultsConfirming past studies, physician demographics (e.g. medical specialty) predicted attitudes toward communicating scientific uncertainty. Additionally, physicians' beliefs about their patients' ambiguity aversion significantly predicted these preferences. Physicians who thought that more of their patients would have negative reactions to ambiguous information were more likely to think that they should decide what is best for their patients (β = 0.065, P = 0.013), and to withhold an intervention that had uncertainty associated with it (β = 0.170, P < 0.001). DISCUSSION: When faced with the task of communicating scientific uncertainty about medical tests and treatments, physicians' perceptions of their patients' ambiguity aversion may be related to their attitudes towards communicating uncertainty.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.