The influence of values in shared (medical) decision making

IntroductionDecision making is omnipresent in medicine, and countless completely different matters have to be decided every day. “Which examination is necessary?”, “Shall other physicians be involved?”, “Which is the best treatment?” and so on. Contemporary approaches, like the Shared Decision Making (SDM) model, request that physicians and patients decide together upon medical matters (Elwyn et al. 2000). Even though some authors pointed out the limits of SDM (Woolf 2001; Whitney 2003), in most cases the benefits outweigh the disadvantages: Satisfaction and investment in the outcome of both patient and physicia…