Date and Time
March 3, 2004
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Sally S. Araki

Endometriosis is a chronic gynecologic disorder that can cause debilitating pain. Clinical evidence does not point to a single best treatment for pain relief, and treatment options involve tradeoffs between benefits and harms, associated with a wide range of personal values and quality-of-life implications. To facilitate shared decision making, we examined two approaches to patient preference assessment (decision analysis and balancing technique) in interviews of patients with confirmed disease. Both preference assessment techniques are well established in the literature, but they originate from different theories of decision making.

The objectives of this study were

1. to evaluate patients' preferences for the treatment of endometriosis pain using decision analysis and the balancing technique;
   
2. to characterize the differences in treatment preferences; and
   
3. to evaluate patients' preferences for assessment technique.
   

Sally Araki Aalfs, MS, PhD, is a research associate at CHP/PCOR and an Interdisciplinary Women's Health Research Scholar at the Stanford School of Medicine's Department of Medicine.