Abstract

Patient satisfaction is currently used as a comparative measure to evaluate the quality of health care programs. This seems the best way to evaluate results although an important discordance might exist between patient’s perception and doctor’s opinion regarding satisfactory outcome after surgery, including that after joint replacement. Pain remains a major cause of dissatisfaction for many patients. To understand the meaning of pain, i.e. “why does pain hurt” in some patients but not in other ones, and to decipher patient’s pain expression is a key feature of patientdoctor communication. Questionnaires based on patient’s personality traits (integrated and comprehensive reflection of psychological traits) are still underused but might help the doctors to get closer to their patients and understand them better. Besides the source of the relationship, dysfunction should not be attributed only to the person with pain, as the lack of doctors’ training to capture and understand the psycho-social dimensions of pain can be pointed out too. Failure to address the psycho-social dimensions of patient’s pain and suffering, a skill which relies on patients-doctor communication, represents a major socio-economic problem as it may negatively impact postoperative outcome both in terms of poor management of treatment failure and in term of poor prediction of surgical outcome.