What Makes Some Diseases More Typical than Others? A Survey on theImpact of Disease Characteristics and Professional Background on DiseaseTypicality

摘要

Health professionals tend to perceive some diseases as more typical than others.If disease typicalities have implications for health professionals or healthpolicy makers’ handling of different diseases, then it is of great social,epistemic, and ethical interest. Accordingly, it is important to find out whatmakes health professionals rank diseases as more or less typical. This studyinvestigates the impact of various factors on how typical various diseases areperceived to be by health professionals. In particular, we study the influenceof broad disease categories, such as somatic versus psychological/behavioralconditions, and a wide range of more specific disease characteristics, as wellas the health professional’s own background. We find that professionalbackground strongly impacted disease typicality. All professionals (MD, RN,physiotherapists and psychologists) considered somatic conditions to be moretypical than psychological/behavioral. As expected, psychologists also foundpsychological/behavioral conditions to be more typical than did other groups.Professions of respondents could be well predicted from their individualtypicality judgments, with the exception of physiotherapists and nurses who hadvery similar judgment profiles. We also demonstrate how various diseasecharacteristics impact typicality for the different professionals. Typicalityshowed moderate to strong positive correlations with condition severity andmortality, and only non-severe conditions were rated as atypical. Hence,studying how different disease characteristics and occupational backgroundinfluences health professionals’ perception of disease typicality is the firstand important step toward a more general study of how typicality influencesdisease handling.