An incomprehensible conversation

It’s not just dentists who can struggle with communication. Frequently, medical doctors, and even medical specialists, fail dismally in getting the message across.

The irony is that often the doctors who try the hardest waste the most time and cause the most confusion. Here’s a case in point.

Sometimes, the harder you try the worse it is.

Someone I know visited a cardiologist for a consultation. The cardiologist is a nice, sincere person who clearly tries very hard.

To explain the condition to the patient the cardiologist brought out a plastic model of a heart. The cardiologist then gave a 10-minute lecture on the workings of the heart.

The lecture was a confusing waste of time because:

• the patient remembered virtually none of it and

• the patient did not gain an understanding of their condition

In fact, the lecture was worse than a waste of time because if there were any important nuggets of information in the lecture they got buried under a mountain of useless facts.

In this case, more information produced less understanding which is, I am sure, precisely the opposite of what the cardiologist intended.

The situation could have been explained very simply:

“There is a blockage in the main blood vessel that comes out of your heart and that is why you feel puffed out and tired.”

25 words and the patient knows exactly what is going on and why.

Take a moment to pause and think.

The next time you are thinking of explaining the technicalities of tooth anatomy to a patient I encourage you to pause for a moment.

Does the patient really need to know this? Are they interested? Will they remember it? Why am I telling them this?

If you don’t have good answers to those questions, maybe you need to skip the lecture and just give the patient the information they need to know.

As the famous quote from Shakespeare goes:

“Brevity is the soul of wit.”