The Doctor And The Silenced Patient

In Confessions of a Medicine Man: An Essay in Popular Philosophy (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000, pp. 109-110) Alfred I. Tauber writes:

Health care providers have to listen, respond, and generally account for the subjective experience of a patient’s complaint. So much of our discontent can be traced to the too little time the physician spends with a client, and how poorly a true dialogue develops. Focusing upon the clinical narrative, the patient’s rendition of the disease experience offers crucial insight to the physician, both as scientist and empathetic, that is, ethical, healer. Beyond obtaining information that may be important in tending to the patient’s particular physical needs, a patient’s own description of the illness presents the physician with the problem of suffering, and the profound disruption, uncertainty, and pain that disease imposes. To ignore this aspect of illness is to deny the patient’s fundamental humanity and relegate them to the status of object.

In an older post titled Taylorism and the Doctor’s Office I had complained about the slavish devotion to efficiency and throughput maximization visible in the work of the physician; an important component of the dissatisfaction I felt then, one not fully articulated, was that my physicians, my healers, were simply not listening to me:

The patient, meanwhile, many of his questions unanswered, his possible inputs to the diagnostic process ignored, returns home, disquieted by the experience, disillusioned by the wonders of face-to-face contact with a fellow human being, and supposedly a healer at that.

This is a real frustration with serious consequences. As a patient, I have a great deal to tell my doctor about my personal experience of the illness: this is how it feels on the ‘inside’; this is how it affects the way I move, the way I relate to my body; these are the kinds of things I want to do and cannot do; this is how I now see myself in relation to the world and my body. I see these as important inputs into the healing process; I see them as descriptions of my dis-ease, a tabulation of the ways in which I am no longer whole and long to put back together again. My illness is not just a set of physical markers; it is an impairment of my being in this world, and I am best placed to report on a very particular aspect of that fractured relationship.

Because I consider myself a good observer, and a good reporter, I come to each doctor’s visit with a sense of anticipation: I will place these reports and descriptions at the service of my doctor, and he will combine them with his expert physiological, medical, and scientific knowledge to produce the optimum healing package. Together, doctor and patient, interacting with each other, will move to a new co-anchored state of being: the doctor becomes a better doctor by healing, by having his skills honed on this new ‘challenge’; I will return to good health.

But my doctor has no time for such niceties; he cannot be bothered to listen to his partner; he cannot wait to hear the ‘other side’ of the story; he is only concerned with test parameters, visible observations, and quick slotting into categories (and the submission of an insurance claim for payment.) To listen to a patient will interfere with the most efficient ‘best practice,’ the one recommended by the management consultant group in charge of his clinic or hospital.

The patient’s experience of the illness falls by the wayside; it is the least important part of the modern ‘healing’ process. And with that assessment, the patient becomes just as marginal, ready to be objectified.