Working in A Post-Truth Environment
Trust is now a core clinical leadership skill, not a “nice-to-have” soft skill. In a post-truth world, orthotic and prosthetic leaders have to connect the objective and the subjective in a way that earns influence with patients, payers and their own teams.
Why Post-Truth Matters in Your Clinic
Post-truth simply means people no longer respond to established facts; they filter information through whether it feels safe, believable and aligned with “their truth.” That’s as true in your exam rooms and treatment plans as it is in boardrooms, policy debates and social activity.
Institutional trust has eroded broadly, so patients and staff lean more heavily on peer stories, online communities and personal experience to decide what (and who) they trust. If you lead an O&P practice, this shift shows up when a well supported clinical plan still meets skepticism because of prior system failures, insurance battles or broken promises.
I recently read a SmartBrief article that claims that even the clearest message fails if the audience doubts the source, while imperfect communication can still move people when trust is strong. For O&P leaders, that means your clinical expertise and your documentation are only as persuasive as the trust you’ve built with patients, referral sources and payers.
Volkswagen’s denial during its emissions scandal and Boeing’s more accountable response to the 737 Max crisis are used to show how operational credibility shapes public trust, not just PR. In O&P, the equivalent is how consistently your documentation, billing practices and outcomes align with what you tell patients and payers you stand for.
Orthotists and prosthetists bring a unique blend of engineering, biomechanics, and patient centered training that makes them particularly skilled at working with objective data. That background allows you to see the measurements, alignment, gait deviations, and device parameters recorded in a system like OPIE as the structural framework for a sound care plan, not just paperwork. In a post-truth environment, objective data becomes perhaps the most important part of your clinical and leadership toolkit, not just your compliance checklist. Accurate, consistent, and meaningful documentation supports clinical decision-making, strengthens your position with payers, and signals to patients that your recommendations rest on more than opinion.
Honoring the Subjective, Grounding in the Objective
Post-truth is not a call to abandon facts or lean into manipulation; it is a reminder that facts live inside networks of belief and emotion. Your patients’ pain stories, fears about mobility, cultural beliefs and prior experiences with healthcare are subjective—but they are real and must be heard with respect.
Effective O&P communicators use their objective data to anchor conversations and their emotional literacy to validate the subjective experience. For example, you might say, “Here’s what your gait analysis and pressure data show, and here’s how what you’re feeling/experiencing fits with that picture,” bringing both worlds together in a way that builds trust rather than competing narratives.
The article argues leaders must treat communication as trust building, they must master ‘making sense,’ and practice strategic transparency. In an O&P practice, that looks like:
Connecting documentation to meaning.
You explain how the objective findings recorded in OPIE inform your device selection, follow-up schedule and long-term goals, rather than letting documentation feel like a disconnected administrative task.
Translating data into “what this means for you.”
You use your training to interpret complex measurements into plain language about comfort, function, mobility and safety, inviting questions and cocreating the plan with the patient.
Being transparent about uncertainty.
You acknowledge when the data tell part of the story but not all of it, and you describe the steps you’ll take—adjustments, follow-ups, additional tests—to refine the plan together.
To measure your mastery of trust, what matters most are behavioral indicators of trust: patients returning and following plans, clinicians escalating issues early, referral sources giving your more prescriptions and more new patients accepting your documentation and corrective actions. When your objective documentation and your leadership behavior align consistently over time, your influence grows—even in a skeptical, post-truth world.