Contributors on this site regularly recommend improved doctor-patient communication. Indeed, that’s one reason I’m a devoted reader. But we need to articulate exactly what “communication” is.
When I ask colleagues about that word, they usually define it as what they say to patients. I can’t argue with that. Yes, we need to express ourselves clearly and simply. But communication includes much more.
The occasional complaints I hear from patients about their care are never about medicine’s high-tech presence. Instead, they’re uniformly about deficiencies in communication, actually healthcare’s lowest-tech aspect. Too often, patients say, they’re treated almost like bystanders.
A convalescing friend told me, “When I was in the hospital, I was poked and probed and ultraviolated, but never touched.”
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