Beneficent Persuasion: Techniques and Ethical Guidelines to Improve Patients' Decisions.

An essay is presented on the ways in which heuristics and biases can influence the decisions of patients. It features clinical examples to show the effects of heuristics and biases and argues for the need of their understanding by physicians to rebias patients and promote their health and other values. It also describes techniques used by physicians in order to present health decisions which are likely to motivate patients towards less biased and more long term conducive decisions.