CHICAGO – There’s an open secret in medicine: Patients lie. They lie about how much they smoke and whether they’re taking their medicine. They understate how much they drink and overstate how much they exercise. They feign symptoms to get appointments quicker and ask doctors to hide the truth from insurance companies. ‘Doctors have a rule of thumb. Whatever the patient says they’re drinking, multiply it by three,’ said Dr. Bruce Rowe, a family doctor in suburban Milwaukee. ‘If they say two drinks a day, assume they have six.’ Hippocrates, the father of medicine, is said to have warned his students in about 400 B.C. that patients often dissemble when they say they’ve taken their medicine. TV’s fictional Dr. Gregory House repeats the same message to his crack team: ‘Everybody lies.’ But lying can lead to expensive diagnostic procedures and unneeded referrals to specialists. It also can have disastrous results. ‘I could have ended up in a coma’ ‘I definitely learned my lesson. I could have ended up in a coma,’ said Michael Levine, a 28-year-old financial adviser in Los Angeles who lied to a specialist he saw for a wrist injury. Misguided pride, he said, […]