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Introduction. Health Outcomes Are Influenced By A Variety

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Introduction

Health outcomes are influenced by a variety of factors, one of which is clinician communication abilities.1 In fact, I took a class in medical school dedicated to teaching the art of the interview and how to properly build and maintain the sacred patient-clinician relationship. Health communication is growing field of medical research that both examines the current state of clinician communication and uses experiment to improve or further understand the process of disseminating health information. 2 This year, I spent 10 months researching health communication and medical decision-making using transcripts of real patient encounters from men with early stage prostate cancer and from women deciding between surgical treatment …show more content…

The rest of the conversation felt different. After the surgeon apologized again and explained that she could save the nipple on the non-cancerous side, but not the cancer side a family member asks the patient “That’s a big deal isn’t it?”

The Bad: Throughout the transcripts I have also noticed the sheer number of “medspeak.” Medical jargon, the vernacular of clinicians, forces the patient to decide if the clinician is sharing important concepts or irrelevant details. Furthermore, few patients are sufficiently healthcare literate to understand complex medical language. 4,5 In one transcript a women who is discussing treatment of her breast cancer asked about the imaging of her breast cancer to further understand her disease. The clinician responded with:

Clinician: There’s the stuff showing your PASH at nine o’clock and ten o’clock and there’s the invasive and then the receptors got split but your estrogen receptor is positive, progesterone receptor, positive and HER2 not overexpressed.

Patient: So can you – English?

Clinicians are entrenched in medical jargon and often assume that their patients understand the information they are conveying. Frequently, patients faced with jargon do not ask questions or interrupt like this patient did.6 Without this feedback from the patient, I assume the clinician would have continued on her explanation without realizing that her patient was lost, her question continuing to remain

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