| Background.. Empowering patients to undertake self-care is becoming an important clinical objective. The ability to discern whether patients respond to internal or external motivation may prove useful in initiating patient self-care. This paper reports on a study evaluating the health locus of control as a tool for refining this aspect of the clinical consultation. Objective: To undertake a pilot study to ascertain whether patients with a strong internal locus of control actively embrace self-care, select more autonomous self-care initiatives and rely on independent sources of information. Conversely, to ascertain whether patients with a strong external locus of control prefer professionally monitored self-care and authoritative sources of information.
Sample: Convenience sampling of chiropractic patients attending chiropractic clinics in the coastal region of Victoria and Queensland. Eight Australian-trained chiropractors consented to have their patients interviewed. Of the 105 patients invited to participate, 99 agreed. Method: A case study was undertaken to describe and compare the locus of control of chiropractic patients with their self-care behaviours. Patients were interviewed and asked to complete a locus of control questionnaire. Data collected focused upon participants', smoking, alcohol, maintenance chiropractic care, exercise and nutritional supplementation practices. An attempt was also made to identify sources of information that triggered self-care initiatives. Results: Overall, the chiropractic patient sample reported a healthy lifestyle. Seventy-six percent (76%) of the sample had maintenance chiropractic care, 67% undertook regular exercise, 49% took nutritional supplements, and 84% were non- smokers. Only one patient reported more than four standard alcoholic drinks per day. Lay persons served as important sources of health information, particularly with respect to chiropractic care and exercise. No clear trends linking locus of control with particular self-care initiatives or self-care information triggers were discerned. Conclusions: This pilot study failed to identify trends in self-care consistent with behaviours predicted using the health locus of control. As failure to support these hypotheses may be attributable to the small sample size, a larger study is needed before any definitive conclusions can be drawn. The emergence of lay persons as important information sources upon which self-care initiatives are triggered endorses a role for chiropractors in health education. This abstract is reproduced with the permission of the publisher; full text by subscription.
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