Patients Who Read Their Hospital Charts

To the Editor: In the January 17 issue of the Journal , Altman and his colleagues reported a high incidence of personality disorders among subjects requesting access to their medical records, but only 11 of 2500 patients made such requests. This very low frequency suggests that the usual factors that discourage record-reading were operative in the institution studied. An intervention to facilitate access to medical records could have been expected to result in many more requests by patients quite different from the subjects reported. It is inappropriate to generalize from a patient population in which record requesting is extremely rare, . . . No extract is available for articles shorter than 400 words.