Today’s not news that the economy remains strong influence on the decision of many people who want refractive surgery these days, and for many medical practices facing these challenging times has not been easy, leading doctors be very careful in selecting the appropriate advertising medium. Many of them have significantly reduced their budgets on marketing and focus on creating new strategies of conservative and more effective way in order to sustain the costs involved in practicing refractive surgery (LASIK).
But as the market becomes more competitive, demand becomes increasingly scarce, and these circumstances, gives the perfect environment to manifest new opportunities for others, making this market mutate or evolve constantly. This development goes unnoticed by most consumers, if not to all of them. But while LASIK is still an intriguing issue to many, for others it may be just a key word that provide some profit, even those who have no connection with the issue rather than a Web site, can certainly generate some money with advertising.
As many say, (the money is not everything) and I must say that I agree with this saying, as I see it in practice very often in my work. While money is a key word in deciding whether I can afford to have the surgery, is not the only one who dismisses the patient to have this procedure, because two additional factors are attributed to this game, and these are; (Be candidate and sign the consent-form).
We don’t have to enquire into (being a candidate) because we all know that there is a preliminary evaluation to determine if the patient is a candidate or not, and just after this evaluation (LASIK-Workup) will eventually be ready to proceed with surgery, as long as the patient is a candidate according to the medical determination.
However, I must contribute to the following advice to other professionals in order to avoid misunderstandings between patients and physicians.
When doctors determinate and notifies the patient whether or not is a candidate, should never be used phrases such as, (good candidate, bad candidate, perfect candidate or not very good candidate). The proper way to say it will be (you are a candidate or you’re not a candidate period) and I have to mention this example because I have seen claims of patients to doctors for saying that phrase in the (LASIK-Workup), especially when the results were not satisfactory for the patient.
And finally (the surgical consent form) We have always had a lower percentage of total patients who do not end up doing the surgery for one of these three reasons (money, no candidate and disagree with the surgical consent.) To our amazement one of our latest statistics showed that in a particular month, 3 of 27 patients did not want to proceed with surgery because of what it says on the paragraphs of the consent form, which it somehow caught our attention because we had never exceeded certain percentages.
Whereas many of these consents can be found on various Web pages ophthalmologic entities, we are surprised to see in our collection of those, there is great similarity in some paragraphs. But before publishing this article we have compiled a couple of these, in order to find something in common to ours and obtain additional information and see what can be done about it. As a result, was that of the seven consents to descend on the Web in different LASIK practitioners, 7 have a 90% similarity, without the same content, but taking the same approach.
My question is, does any of you know what to expect in the consent form?
