Author: Matt Davis / Source: Big Think
- One important, but often neglected, factor in the transition from sickness to health is in how patients perceive and understand their illness.
- It’s challenging for physicians to gain insight into the mental and physical state of their patients.
- A new review of 101 articles has found that asking patients to draw their illnesses can help predict health outcomes and provide doctors insight into their patients’ experiences.
One of the challenges to making sick people healthy is to make sure they understand and perceive their illness accurately and stick to treatment plans. Medical researchers have long tried to understand what it takes to get people to follow through on their treatment. Through their research, they developed the Common-Sense Model of Self-Regulation. The model really is just common sense, but medical researchers need a name for everything, it seems: The way that patients pursue their goal to get healthy is based on how they perceive their illness.
So, to make sure that patients follow their treatment plans and engage in healthy practices, it’s essential to make sure they understand their illness. There are a variety of ways to figure out whether a patient understands their condition accurately — one would think that it’d be common sense to just ask a patient to describe their illness or maybe fill out a questionnaire. But these methods can influence a patient’s perceptions of their illness, and, as per the Common-Sense Model, influence how they try to get healthy.
Now, a new article published in the January installment of Healthy Psychology Review has taken a deep dive into a growing field of research to try and see how well drawings of an illness correspond to how patients think of their illness, how they’ll cope, and ultimately how likely they are to get healthy again.
Using drawings to predict health outcomes
The idea that drawing an illness can offer insights into a patient’s state of mind and health outcomes is gaining more and more traction in the medical community. Starting from 1970 to 2002, an average of 0.5 papers on this topic were published per year. After that point and up until 2013, an average…
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