How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection offers actionable steps for improving communication between health professionals and patients based on visual, auditory, and emotional understanding from the principles of cognitive psychology. Drawing on the author’s personal experience as both a healthcare professional and a mother of two children, How to Improve Doctor-Patient Connection explores communication between doctors and patients as well as bias in healthcare. This how-to text includes several practical applications that can be applied to healthcare encounters, enabling readers to form habits based on visual analysis of body language, auditory information from language and tone of voice, and logical emotion perception that will allow for improved doctor-patient connection. By integrating the perspectives of both doctors and patients and applying a psychological lens, this text is invaluable to healthcare practitioners, students of medicine, healthcare, biology, and related fields, and anyone looking to improve their own or other’s quality of doctor-patient interactions and overall healthcare experience.

This volume covers many of the ways of speaking that create problems between doctor and patient. The questions under consideration in the present book are the following: How is the doctor-patient interaction structured in a particular culture? What takes place during the process? What causes misunderstandings, lack of cooperation and even total non-compliance? What is the outcome of the interaction and how does the patient benefit from it? Finally, and this is the ultimate purpose of this book: How can the interaction be improved so that an optimum outcome is assured for the patient with maximum satisfaction to the physician?

Designed to synthesize a growing international and interdisciplinary body of experience, this volume provides a mandate and a charge to medicine to fundamentally transform the traditional clinical method and the social relations it fosters between doctor and patient and between student and teacher. The contributors challenge the medical establishment to change their clinical method from that of a disease-centred to a patient-centred one. Four sections deal with issues related to the doctor's own transformation, the medical interview, teaching and learning, and validation.

Do you feel that your doctor doesn't pay attention to what you say? Does your doctor cut you off when you try to explain how you feel? Do you think your doctor could remember your name without referring to your chart? Does your doctor seem to be in such a hurry that you don't even get a chance to ask your most important questions? Do you spend more time waiting than actually talking to your doctor? Do you understand what your doctor says? At one time or another, we have all had these complaints. This book will teach you how to ask the right questions, understand the answers, and show you how to take more control of your visits to the doctor and your own health. This is the first book in which communication pioneer Barbara M. Korsch, M.D., reveals what she has learned about the doctor-patient relationship dilemma during almost half a century of investigation. In clear, simple language, Dr. Korsch answers most of our common questions: How do I know when I'm sick enough to go to the doctor? How do I know if it's serious enough to go to the emergency room? What do I do if I can't follow the advice my doctor gives me? She walks us through a typical visit to the doctor, showing us how to prepare ourselves so we don't forget the question that has been worrying us for weeks as soon as we walk through the doctor's door. She gives important tips on how to survive the dreaded hospital experience. And she offers insight into the doctor's side of the relationship, showing how doctors are trained to be task-oriented and how their natural human sympathy is discouraged throughout their careers. Finally, she offers patients useful strategies for humanizing the relationship. Korsch's helpful, commonsense recommendations are extensively illustrated with real-life doctor-patient conversations which she recorded on audio and video tape over the course of the last thirty years. She was one of the first medical professionals to emphasize the importance of teaching doctors how to talk to patients as part of their medical training. She serves as consultant and lecturer to medical schools, hospitals, and medical practices throughout the world to help the next generation of doctors communicate with their patients. Above all, after years of research, she has found abundant evidence that the relationship patients form with their doctors directly determines the quality of the care they receive. This is a vital book for anyone who is concerned about their health and who wants to take control of their medical care. So much depends upon asking the right questions and on finding a doctor who will listen to you. This book gives you the tools and the confidence to do just that.

Argumentation between Doctors and Patients discusses the use of argumentation in clinical settings. Starting from the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation, it aims at providing an understanding of argumentative discourse in the context of doctor-patient interaction. It explains when and how interactions between doctors and patients can be reconstructed as argumentative, what it means for doctors and patients to reasonably resolve a difference of opinion, what it implies to strive simultaneously for reasonableness and effectiveness in clinical discourse, and when such efforts derail into fallaciousness. Argumentation between Doctors and Patients is of interest to all those who seek to improve their understanding of argumentation in a medical context – whether they are students, scholars of argumentation, or medical practitioners. Frans H. van Eemeren, Bart Garssen and Nanon Labrie are prominent argumentation theorists. In writing Argumentation between Doctors and Patients, they have benefited from the advice of an Advisory Board consisting of both medical practitioners and argumentation scholars.

Due to advances within neuroscience, we are now in a much better position to be able to describe and discuss the biological mechanisms that underlie the doctor-patient relationship. Using this knowlege, this book describes and demonstrates the power that the doctor's behaviour has on a patient's behaviour and capacity for recovery from illness.

This 2006 volume provides a comprehensive discussion of communication between doctors and patients in primary care consultations. It brings together a team of leading contributors from the fields of linguistics, sociology and medicine to describe each phase of the primary care consultation, identifying the distinctive tasks, goals and activities that make up each phase of primary care as social interaction. Using conversation analysis techniques, the authors analyze the sequential unfolding of a visit, and describe the dilemmas and conflicts faced by physicians and patients as they work through each of these activities. The result is a view of the medical encounter that takes the perspective of both physicians and patients in a way that is both rigorous and humane. Clear and comprehensive, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, communication studies, sociology, and medicine.