ABSTRACT
Healthcare decisions are often difˆcult to make. The stakes are high; risks and outcomes are uncertain. To further complicate matters, the process of decision making in health care-including communication, deliberation, and decision making-is embedded within complex social contexts. Factors such as gender, race, culture, norms, and class are at play in how doctors and patients consider and make decisions about medical care. The literature on medical decision making has done well to focus on how these characteristics in™uence the process of making decisions. Yet, often missing from our understanding is the social context of communication itself. Fortunately, there is a large collection of literature on this topic in the social sciences. Unfortunately, there has been little dialogue between the social sciences literature on deliberation and the health sciences literature on medical decision making. In this chapter we begin this dialogue and generate two main insights.
