Note to all medical professionals, do NOT treat your patients like they’re your students, use SIMPLER ways of explaining to them what conditions they have, translated…
I’d written a previous article, “The Enlightenment from the Plumber”, on how it will only take THREE minutes for a doctor who knows what s/he is doing, to make the right calls on diagnoses, and that it will take OVER three hours for the doctors who don’t have a CLUE what they were doing, to understand what the matter was with the patients. But, this, is from the angle of the calls of diagnoses by the doctors, NOT from the angles of the patients and their families. If the doctor was considering on behalf of the patients, then he would know, that the patients were thinking: I got here late last night, and finally signed on the role sheet, why did you just, push me out of your office in a matter of just a few minutes’ time?
Using the Slides to Explain the Conditions, the Visuals Made it Easier for the Patients to Understand
Let’s first, set aside the discussions of whether or not it’s reasonable, the subsidiary from the Health Insurance Institutions, and let’s talk about having effective communications with the patients. What’s meant by communicating effectively is using terms that the patients can understand, how to prepare for the treatment phases, what are the chances of success? And, what are some side-effects after treatments? These seemingly ordinary problems, are usually always shed light on after falling ill or watching someone we love falling ill, and in need of consulting a medical professional.
The way I did it, was taking out the slides I’d used for teaching my students and played them on my laptop to explain to the patients. This usually takes a lot of time, but it’s more persuasive, with the visuals, it’s easier for the patients to understand. For instant, in the regular health exams, the doctors would take x-rays of the patients’ carotid arteries, and, they would take a look at the patients’ thyroids as well, and, they can detect that anomalies in the thyroid glands, especially thyroid cancers.
explaining what he saw on the X-rays, using the language that his patient CAN understand, hopefully, NOT my photograph…
Using Empathy to Listen to the Patients, a Win-Win for Both Doctors AND Patients
The doctors may encounter stressing cases of patients. For instance, those patients who’d squatted in the offices, refusing to leave, or those who asked the same questions over, and over again. The most serious involves having physical altercations with the medical professionals. Reasons may include: the patients didn’t get the treatments they were hoping for, that their diagnoses fell short of their expectations, or, the patients didn’t feel that they were, cured, and felt upset. And of course, there may be the personality characters of being too anxious of the patients, or the doctors were too busy, and, only treated the patients a short time, without explaining things to them thoroughly enough.
If the doctors can use some empathy to listen to the patients, and using those easily understood terms to explain, and avoiding the jargons of the medical professions, maybe, it can, resolve the issues they encountered clinically.
Now, in the classroom sessions of medical schools, they would type on the computers then, projected the words onto the screens. And sometimes I would get invited to give lectures to ordinary people on basic health knowledge. Actually, not only toward the public, even to the students who are in the medical majors in their common courses, their opinions of how the professors presented the slides were often, very surprising. For instance, there were too much blood on the slides presented, or, too full of medical jargon they couldn’t understand. These, were easily resolved things for students in the medical majors, but, to those students who aren’t in the medical majors, as well as members of the general public, this can become a huge problem.
No matter what, there are a ton of blind spots in the subjectivity of humans, in medical professionals too. If you can use more empathy when you talked to others, then, these problems can easily be, resolved.
So, this, is the importance of having empathy, and, making the materials understandable to those you are talking to, for instance, you wouldn’t take to a client (aka. patients???), the way you lecture to your class of medical school students, would you? After all, these are, two various groups of people, with different levels of understanding, one group is made up of people who only want to know what’s wrong with them, so, talking to this group, you may need to stop using the medical professional terms and just use the vernacular languages to explain to them, but, feel free to use a TON of medical jargons when you explain the conditions to your class of medical students all you want, after all, that, is what they’re training to be, medical PROFESSIONALS!