Most of doctors lack knowledge and skills on communicating with patients. They are ready to answer questions concerning pain, medications, appointment schedule, but when it comes to emotional and sensitive questions like deadly diseases, physicians are not prepared to talk to patients.
A team of researchers from University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York is the first to look at how doctors empathize and emotionally support their patients, examining dialogs between 20 lung cancer patients and physicians. All the talks were audio recorded and later examined by specialists. Researchers accounted that there were 384 "empathic opportunities" for doctors, but they responded to 39 cases only, which accounts for 10% of all cases.
Moreover, doctors empathized only at the end of the conversation: during the conversation there have been two cases when doctors should support patients, but they responded only to the third case. This means that patient-physician talk could last shorter and could be more beneficial for both sides, it doctors be more attentive to emotional state of patients.
Doctors are educated and prepared to answer professional questions, but when it comes to patient fears, anxiety and death, they don't know what to say and they try to move the discussion to the professional field. However, when it comes to deadly disease, when doctors can actually do nothing to extend lives, they should at least support patients to improve the quality of life. In such cases, when doctors do not empathize patients, they are actually useless.
This small but serious study urges the need of changing the idea about doctors' function. Physicians are not just the ones diagnosing diseases and assigning treatments, they should be the ones who can make patients feel comfortable and fearless. They should help patients to cope with diseases, even with deadly ones. For doctors there is not much to do to achieve this goal, the only thing needed is to make them understand that their emotional support and empathy is extremely important for patients.
By Ruzanna Haroutiunyan for eMaxHealth
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