Doctors’ first words to patients matter
In an April 2014 article in The New England Journal of Medicine titled “The Virtues of Irrelevance,” Penn State College of Medicine Department of Humanities faculty members Daniel Wolpaw, MD, and Dan Shapiro, PhD, discussed the very first things said to patients.
Both men noticed that experienced, humanistic physicians and healthcare professionals frequently avoid diving directly into medical or “relevant” questions when first meeting a patient; rather, the first spoken words are often about earrings, an article of clothing advertising a sports team, or some other specific observation about the individual patient that sounds more neighborly than medical.
The two describe support in the literature for such “irrelevant” comments, and concluded that opening with natural conversation levels the relationship, deepens perspectives, relaxes patients, encourages their sense of agency and identity, and lays the foundation for an authentic therapeutic relationship. “When this first exchange focuses on even a minor uniqueness, it communicates that we are attending to them as people and not just another in a long stream of faceless objects or problems,” the two wrote in a column describing their work for the Arnold P. Gold Foundation.
Read Wolpaw and Shapiro’s Gold Foundation commentary here, and see the NEJM article here.
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