Physicians’ Communication Skills are Overlooked and Undervalued
A 2020 Exclusive on The Health Care Blog
How we take a medical history or review of systems, from our choice of words and tone of voice to our body language, can make all the difference in the world in terms of what we learn about our patients. I think this skill is undervalued in healthcare, compared with journalism or criminal investigative work. Here’s a piece I wrote once for The Health Care Blog:
Interviewing celebrities can make you a celebrity yourself, and it can make you very rich. So there’s got to be something to it or it would be a commodity. The world of media certainly recognizes the special skill it takes to get people to reveal their true selves.
At the other end of the spectrum of human communication lies our ability to explain and also our ability to influence. These three aspects of what we do—elicit, explain and influence—are far from trivial, and in my opinion quite fundamental aspects of practicing medicine.
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The problem with our work environment is that all the technology and all the well meaning efforts we are subjected to have, ironically, conspired to distance us from our patients and made us less effective than we could be.
— Read on thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2020/10/02/physicians-communication-skills-are-overlooked-and-undervalued/