Virtually across the board of medicine and psychiatry, doctors will constantly and consistently oversell the benefits of a given treatment, and undersell the risks and side effects of it. This may not be as surprising when you look at some of the key factors into how medical and psychiatric treatment is learned and then conducted on patients.
Why do doctors often oversell the benefits of a given treatment, and minimize the risks and side effects of it?
1. Treatment is rarely experienced first-hand.
While you don’t need to undergo surgery to understand the benefits of surgery or how to do surgery, you will surely have a great appreciation to the patient’s perspective if every surgeon was required to get an appendectomy before being allowed to practice. Surgeons know, in most cases only hypothetically, what it is like to go under the scalpel. I wonder how much differently a surgeon might practice if that were no longer the case.
In the same vein, I wonder how many psychiatrists would continue to prescribe atypical antipsychotics or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) if they themselves tried it a few times. That’s because we treat fixing human problems the same way we treat fixing a car or dish disposal — it’s just plumbing and organic connections.