Why Do People Ignore A Doctor’s Advice?

A physician I’ve been going to for years told me about how he used to have a patient whom he treated for a terrible problem with spontaneous bleeding. One day, when he didn’t turn up for his appointment, the doctor called him up at home and found that he had died from spontaneous bleeding. The physician felt like a failure. If he was treating him, and if he died of the very same disease, didn’t mean that the physician did not do a good job?

Now, the doctor could have felt that this discovery let him off the hook. If the patient ignored valid doctor advice how could the doctor possibly be responsible? But he didn’t feel that way. Instead, he felt all the more responsible. He knew that there were lots of patients who refuse to take medicines for various personal reasons; and that he never heard of them. But the culture doesn’t permit taking it up with the doctor about this, and it doesn’t permit having the patient’s own up to it. Patients are normally deathly afraid of the doctor and of ticking him off; and doctors generally don’t have the time to ask these kinds of questions.