They lie about taking their medicine, how much they smoke, how much they drink and how much they exercise. They fake symptoms to get appointments sooner 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."

    But lying can have disastrous results.

    "I definitely learned my lesson. I could have ended up in a coma," admitted 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, kept him from mentioning the Xanax he was taking for anxiety. He didn't think the doctor needed to know.

    "He wasn't my regular doctor. He was treating my wrist," Levine said.

    The doctor prescribed the pain reliever Vicodin and Levine took it on top of Xanax. The next few days vanished in a cloud of grogginess. Levine slept through ringing phones and alarms and woke up exhausted. His wrist pain was easing, but he could barely function. Eventually, he stopped the Vicodin, returned to the doctor and, under questioning, confessed.

    "The doctor said, 'Why didn't you tell me? I never would have prescribed you that,'" said Levine, who now realizes how easily he could have overdosed and died. "For the future, I will always fess up."

    Why do patients lie? The examination room itself is an environment that discourages honesty, said Los Angeles psychiatrist Dr. Charles Sophy.

    "You're naked in a gown, and you have a guy standing there clothed with a coat on, and there's all sorts of things in his pocket. And you're sitting there, basically naked ... that makes it hard to come clean," Sophy said. On top of that, the doctor may be rushed.

    A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found a big gap between what patients said and what they did. Researchers looked at how patients with breathing problems used an inhaler equipped with a device that recorded the date and time of use and compared that with what the patients said.

    Seventy-three percent of patients reported using the inhaler on average three times a day, but only 15 percent actually were using it that often. And 14 percent apparently deliberately emptied their inhalers before their appointments to make it look as if they were good patients.

    Some doctors are seeking approaches that encourage more honesty. Dr. Zach Rosen, medical director of New York's Montefiore Family Health Center, asks his patients a series of questions to determine whether they're taking their medicine.

    "I ask, 'What medications are you taking?' At first, I just want the names," he said. "They say, 'I'm taking X, Y or Z.' Then I'll say, 'That's great. How often are you taking that medication?' ... Then I'll say, 'Are you experiencing any problem in taking your medications?'"

    Cyndi Smith, a 45-year-old Weight Watchers leader in suburban Chicago, admits her own lying past when it came to questions about her exercise and eating habits. She says she lied because she was fooling herself.

    "You convince yourself of certain things, and it becomes true, when in reality it's not," she said. If her doctor had questioned her more thoroughly, she says she might have told the truth.

    "I think doctors could be a little more point-blank," she said. "And we need to be a little more honest."

    (Agencies)