What doesn’t work is to argue that the patient has a problem and needs to change, or to offer direct advice or prescribe solutions to the problem without encouraging the patient to make his or her own choices. It doesn’t work when the counselor does most of the talking, functions as a unidirectional information delivery system, imposes a diagnostic label, or behaves in a punitive or coercive manner.
"That authoritative, ‘I’m perfect and you’re not’ approach – it doesn’t work," she said.
The tenets of motivational interviewing are a hot topic in medicine today, although they have been around since the 1970s, Dr. Breuner said. She drew on a 1995 article to describe motivational interviewing in her talk (Behav. Cogn. Psychother. 1995;23:325-34).
Dr. Breuner reported having no relevant financial disclosures.