How can clinicians do a better job of communicating with their patients based on this behavior model?
You have to respect the patient’s style and let that be your guide. Follow their lead. The aim of this kind of research is to develop interventions and management strategies that are tailored to the specific needs of monitors and blunters and matched to their style. We need to do a better job of sensitizing clinicians to the different types of coping styles of their patients. Some clinicians have an intuitive sense that if a patient is asking a lot of questions–they want to know more and they should be told more. If they make a statement and the patient says, “Can you tell me more about that?”– they know that this is a monitoring type of patient to whom one should impart more detailed information and spend more time on all of the specifics of the diagnosis, treatment or its after-effects. With the blunting type of patient, when a doctor says something and the patient doesn’t ask anything further, they get a sense that the patient doesn’t want to know more. We need to train physicians
