Patients currently exercise choices about their care; theywere more positive than practitioners about being given explicitinformation about choice of treatment (Theme 3). The patients’positive responses to being given treatment options, even if theywould not wish to use them, was consistent with the literature[2,60] and suggested that some form of shared decision-making(SDM) would be desirable. However the complexity of theSDM communication process in comparison with simply pro-viding information on risk and benefits may further increasetime pressures within the consultation, especially if more com-prehensive treatment options were provided, as proposed by theosteopaths. A possible mitigating factor is the patients’ complexattitudes to risk (Theme 2). The authors suggest that there maybe a complementarity between SDM and patients’ complex atti-tudes to risk, so that when risk information is presented withinsimple treatment options, the facts are more comprehensible –as found in a recent study using option grids [53].