What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear

Can refocusing conversations between doctors and their patients lead to better health?

Despite modern medicine’s infatuation with high-tech gadgetry, the single most powerful diagnostic tool is the doctor-patient conversation, which can uncover the lion’s share of illnesses. However, what patients say and what doctors hear are often two vastly different things.

Patients, anxious to convey their symptoms, feel an urgency to “make their case” to their doctors. Doctors, under pressure to be efficient, multitask while patients speak and often miss the key elements. Add in stereotypes, unconscious bias, conflicting agendas, and fear of lawsuits and the risk of misdiagnosis and medical errors multiplies dangerously.

Though the gulf between what patients say and what doctors hear is often wide, Dr. Danielle Ofri proves that it doesn’t have to be. Through the powerfully resonant human stories that Dr. Ofri’s writing is renowned for, she explores the high-stakes world of doctor-patient communication that we all must navigate. Reporting on the latest research studies and interviewing scholars, doctors, and patients, Dr. Ofri reveals how better communication can lead to better health for all of us.

• What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
• Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity
• How Doctors Think
• Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue
• Incidental Findings: Lessons from My Patients in the Art of Medicine
• The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More is Getting Us Less
• Medicine in Translation: Journeys with My Patients
• The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
• In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope