Medical decision making among cancer patients

The purpose of this study is to assess the decisional processes used by patients undergoing cancer treatment. Results demonstrated that patients used 4 discrete strategies to make medical decisions: information seeking, information processing, advice following, and ruminating. Patients' decisional style predicted their scores on measures of coping. Patients who used the cognitively effortful information-seeking and information-processing decisional strategies reported using more coping strategies and more of the strategies that prior research has shown to be more effective for coping with life-threatening illness than did patients who used the advice-following decisional strategy (all ps < .05). The 3 groups did not differ in their use of the less effective coping strategies.