Motivational interviewing use for promoting health behavior: an approach of doctor/patient relationship

Many situations in common medical practice, especially in chronic diseases, require patients to be mobilized for health behavior decisions: for daily intake of an antihypertensive drug, performing a mammography for cancer screening, as well as adopting new diet habits in diabetes. Ability to initiate a health behavior depends on several parameters. Some of them are related to the patient, his personality, his illness and treatment's perception; others directly rely on the physician, his attitude and his communication style during the visit, independently of patient's level of resistance to change. Motivational interviewing (MI) is a communication technique, first developed for patients presenting a substance abuse disorder, to explore their ambivalence, overcome their resistances and give them the willingness of a better self-care. Its general principles and basic techniques can be applied by every practitioner and deserve to be better known, given that scientific literature provides evidence for generalizing it in a variety of medical conditions, in structured patient education programs as well as in usual follow-up, for which time is generally restricted. This article provides an overview of MI recent applications and argues for its diffusion in everyday medical practice.