Patient education and counseling
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To investigate parents' experiences and views of clinician communication during primary care consultations for respiratory tract infections (RTIs) in children under 12. ⋯ Clinicians should tailor diagnostic explanations to parental expectations and concerns and address the symptoms of significance to parents. Clinicians should provide advice about symptom relief and more precise safety netting advice.
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With increasing exposure, medical students may forget that technical jargon is unfamiliar to laypeople. To investigate this possibility, authors assessed student perceptions of patient understanding across different years in medical school. ⋯ Training about patient knowledge of medical jargon may be a useful addition to communication skills curricula.
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To explore patients' experiences with online health communities in which both physicians and patients participate (i.e. patient-to-doctor or 'P2D' communities). ⋯ Patients use P2D communities to perform medical, emotional and lifestyle activities. The presence of physicians in P2D communities may inadvertently suggest that the quality of information used for the activities, is controlled. When information is not officially being checked, this should be stated explicitly on the website and supplemented with a statement that information is only indicative and that patients should at all times contact their own physicians.
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Surgeons and psychiatrists have been described as two contrary groups, the one healing by hands and the other by words. Empathy is needed in every physician-patient relationship. We tested whether (1) surgeons and psychiatrists show different levels of cognitive and emotional empathy; (2) measurements of cognitive and emotional empathy correlate with physician-specific empathy; and (3) gender, experience, and career choices are influencing factors. ⋯ Further research is needed to learn about the effects of general medical training on empathy.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
The power of clinicians' affective communication: how reassurance about non-abandonment can reduce patients' physiological arousal and increase information recall in bad news consultations. An experimental study using analogue patients.
The diagnosis of incurable cancer may evoke physiological arousal in patients. Physiological arousal can negatively impact patients' recall of information provided in the medical consultation. We aim to investigate whether clinicians' affective communication during a bad news consultation will decrease patients' physiological arousal and will improve recall. ⋯ Although our findings need to be translated to clinical patients, they suggest that clinicians need to deal with patients' emotions before providing additional medical information.