Common-sense beliefs about illness: a mediating role for the doctor

A great deal is said these days about how important it is for doctors to pay attention to the patient's beliefs about his or her disease. Better knowledge of such beliefs, it is argued, will enable the doctor to counter ignorance, enhance communication, and reduce non-compliance. The view advanced here is that the significance of patients' beliefs and their frequent resistance to rational correction will emerge only if they are seen as components in a process of "narrative reconstruction". It is suggested that the main difficulty is not ignorance but rather the fact that doctor and patient have different purposes: whereas the doctor's objective is to explain the aetiology of the disease, the patient may be more concerned to make sense of the disruption caused by the disease.