Decision making in the physician-patient encounter: Revisiting the shared treatment decisionmaking model

The context for our discussion was a life threatening disease where several treatment options were available with different possible outcomes (benefits and risks or side effects), outcomes could vary in their impact on the patient’s physical and psychological well-being and outcomes in the individual case were uncertain. In this context, we argued that a shared treatment decision-making model could be identified as such by reference to four necessary characteristics (Charles et al., 1997a) as follows: 1 At a minimum, both the physician and patient are involved in the treatment decision-making process.