I was lucky enough to be asked to write the foreword to the 3rd edition of Shared Decision Making in Health Care: Achieving evidence-based patient choice, from Oxford University Press. Here’s the text of that forward. We are at what appears to be a Copernican moment in healthcare, where everything that learned minds thought was true – that the sun revolved around the earth; that miasmas rising from the ground, or humours contained within the human body, caused disease; that only magical beings called doctors could understand or participate in medical care – is being disproved. Medicine stands at a crossroads unlike any other transformation point in its history. As access to information – what I call the democratization of knowledge – has become as simple as the movement of a human finger, the relationship between doctors and the people they care for has undergone a seismic shift. But like many seismic shifts, it’s happening at a level that only those tuned to pick up the signals from it can sense. That I, a patient voice whose only medical knowledge has been acquired as an autodidact with strong research skills, have been asked to write the foreword to the third edition of Shared Decision Making in Health Care is a strong indication that the earth is moving beneath our feet. The knowledge exchange that is the bedrock of shared decision making is creating the mutuality that has been missing in medicine, making a full partnership between doctors and the people they care for finally possible. As is made clear in many parts of this book, building literacy on both sides of the equation is a must for shared decisions – information has to be shared with people in ways they can understand, which makes solid communication skills a must for both patients and…
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