Low Expectations in Health Care

The other day I had a coffee with a lady who had been in my assisted living home. She was much younger than most of my residents. She had a lot of trauma in her life and was having a lot of psychological issues - including a lot of short-term memory loss.

I had not talked to her since she moved out of our home about a year and a half ago. She texted me out of the blue. Her family has moved her around to several homes in the last couple of years.

Things had definitely changed for her.

She had a job at a prestigious business in Phoenix. Doing things she loved. A great salary and benefits.

She is still living in an assisted living home. However, she was told by her psychiatrist that if she could hold the job for 90 days, she would be able to have her own life again on her own. She was on day 21 when I saw her.

So why did she call and want to see me again?

I asked her that question.

Her reply? “You were the only one who really believed in me and pushed me to be better.”

It really hit me when she said this.

The medical industry has very low expectations for people. When someone has a terminal illness, they just guess how long you have to live based on statistics. They never take into account your WILL to live.

Diet? Nah. “Don’t worry about what you eat. Nobody will ever follow our recommendations anyway.”

Maybe that’s why there are so many stories about patients miraculously putting diseases into remission and doctors not being at all curious as to how they did it? The doctors just think nobody else would sacrifice and put in the work like that one patient did.

There’s something in psychology called the Pygmalion effect. Pygmalion was a sculptor in Greek mythology who fell in love with his statue. He loved the statue so much that it came to life.

The idea behind the Pygmalion effect is that people will perform better or worse depending on the expectations you set for them.

There was a study where they gave teachers in a classroom a list of students who had done very well on IQ tests - the gifted students. Unbeknownst to the teachers, the list contained students of all levels of test scores. It was not just the smart ones.

Guess what happened? The ‘gifted’ students ALL improved their IQ scores the most at the end of the test period compared to the other students in the class - regardless of where they were at the beginning.

The opposite is also true. If the teachers have low expectations for their students, they do much worse.

Henry Ford’s quote gives a good summary of this phenomenon. What Henry Ford omitted was that people in authority can really shape your idea of what can and what can’t be achieved.

If our doctors and other medical professionals had higher expectations of us, maybe they would see better results? Just a thought.