Physician-Patient Communication

Everyone who has been a medical patient—and of course this is everyone—knows that interactions with physicians can be rewarding and productive, but often such interactions are upsetting and frustrating. Patients who are sick are worried or uncomfortable, and even if they are not sick (as at a checkup visit) they are often aggravated by the inconvenience of going, waiting, and talking to the doctor. Encounters with doctors are highly charged, and patients often remember—and recount for family and friends—every word exchanged at important moments in the medical visit. Patients also remember, usually too late, things they wished they or the doctor had talked about. Patients’ focus on how they communicate with their doctor should not, of course, be a surprise considering that most of what doctors and patients do is talk. However, the medical profession has come rather slowly to a full awareness of the centrality of talk, and of communication more broadly, to the practice of medicine.