Self-Determination and the patient-health practitioner relationship

Abstract

Motivation is increasingly recognized as an important aspect of health as medical interventions have become more effective in lengthening life expectancy and improving quality of life. Those outcomes are affected by lifestyle, medication use, and elective operations; all require patients to be motivated to gain the benefits. Recent advances in technology have left us sedentary and overweight, with higher risk for heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. America's youngest generation is the first expected to have a shorter lifespan than its parents. Providing information about risks is necessary, but not sufficient to motivate healthy behaviors over the long term. Better understanding of motivation is needed to guide health interventions and training. Mounting empirical evidence from Self-Determination Theory and the recent promotion of patient autonomy to a primary outcome of health care by biomedical ethics and medical professionalism offer an opportunity to explore how motivation affects health and improve the practitioner-patient relationship.