Doctors: Your Behaviour can be half the Cure! Talk to your Patients!

While writing about my visit to the eye specialist, I had the thought of many other similar visits of myself, my family or friends to various doctors and I had to think a little bit about the behavior of all of these doctors, which was in many cases absolutely unprofessional and inacceptable.

Again, I want to start off by telling you that I have also met many very good doctors, also here in India, who are very professional and do their work with their full hearts. Unfortunately however I have experienced many doctors who are the contrary and it is them whom I want to write about. There are so many stories that I could fill several days’ diary entries with them but I just want to give you a general idea of how a lot of those visits look like.

You go to a doctor. First of all, you pay a general fee at the entrance and then sit down to wait. An assistant usually calls you into the room for the examination and consultation. You enter and there is already someone sitting close to the doctor – you get advised to sit further back and watch and listen to their consultation. You are the next and of course the patients who come after you already enter the room.

While this lack of privacy may disturb some, it is kind of normal here in India and it hardly disturbs anybody. The main problem is in my view the behavior of the doctor. I have been to doctors who asked me to describe my problem and while I did, they started typing SMS on their mobile phones. You cannot tell me that they actually listened to all I said. It is impossible to simultaneously listen to what I am saying and write to your friends that you will be late tonight!

I have seen more doctors in India who pick up their ringing mobile phone during our conversation. While I have never experienced this in the west and would still think it is impolite and a lack of attention towards me, I can somehow understand that many doctors make their appointments themselves or take emergency calls and thus have a certain responsibility to pick up the phone.

The biggest problem – if we don’t think of actual incompetence or lack of knowledge in the medical field – is in my opinion that many doctors don’t tell their patients anything about their diagnosis or further treatment. They ask what the patient complains about, ask a few questions in military style, rapidly firing their words out, maybe look at their eyes or tongues and then write down a prescription, tell them to buy the medicine and take it as prescribed. They don’t tell the patients what their disease is, they don’t tell them what they are doing against it and they only say something like ‘Come back in two weeks’ instead of explaining what symptoms will be reduced in how much time.

While I believe that all of this is wrong behavior towards your patients, I also have one explanation as to why these people, who have certainly learnt doing it differently during their studies and training, reduce themselves to a minimum of communication: there are so many patients from rural villages who have no idea of what is where in their body that doctors would keep on talking the whole day long about things that the other one simply does not understand – nor care about.

I have to admit that I understand that after months or years of work and experience, doctors just reduce their talk to a minimum because the other party has no interest or cannot use the information. Nevertheless I will say it is wrong. For one, it feels as though you are losing interest and simply ‘work off’ patients as if you are standing at the conveyor belt. On top of that, you keep important information from the patient who has a right to know what you have diagnosed. And every educated patient will have the feeling that you are either mistreating him or don’t know your business.

So please, dear doctors, change your ways. Take interest, show that you care and pass on some of your knowledge to your patient. A few sentences with some information can mean the world to an ill person who wants to know what is wrong in his body.