Journal of general internal medicine
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Patients seek empathy from their physicians. Medical educators increasingly recognize this need. Yet in seeking to make empathy a reliable professional skill, doctors change the meaning of the term. ⋯ In contrast, leading physician educators define empathy as a form of detached cognition. In contrast, this article argues that physicians' emotional attunement greatly serves the cognitive goal of understanding patients' emotions. This has important implications for teaching empathy.
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Effective communication is a critical component of quality health care, and to improve it we must understand its dynamics. This investigation examined the extent to which physicians' and patients' preferences for control in their relationship (e.g., shared control vs doctor control) were related to their communications styles and adaptations (i.e., how they responded to the communication of the other participant). ⋯ Communication in medical encounters is influenced by the physician's and patient's beliefs about control in their relationship as well as by one another's behavior. The relationship between physicians' partnership building and active patient participation is one of mutual influence such that increases in one often lead to increases in the other.
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It has been suggested that inexperience of new housestaff early in an academic year may worsen patient outcomes. Yet, few studies have evaluated the "July Phenomenon," and no studies have investigated its effect in intensive care patients, a group that may be particularly susceptible to deficiencies in management stemming from housestaff inexperience. ⋯ We found no evidence to support the existence of a July phenomenon in ICU patients. Future studies should examine organizational factors that allow hospitals and residency programs to compensate for inexperience of new housestaff early in the academic year.
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To determine the impact of interpretation method on outpatient visit length. ⋯ In our setting, telephone and patient-supplied interpreters were associated with longer visit times, but full-time hospital interpreters were not.
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Patient-provider communication is essential for effective care of diabetes and other chronic illnesses. However, the relative impact of general versus disease-specific communication on self-management is poorly understood, as are the determinants of these 2 communication dimensions. ⋯ General and diabetes-specific communication are related but unique facets of patient-provider interactions, and improving either one may improve self-management. Providers in these sites are communicating successfully with vulnerable patients. These findings reinforce the potential importance of continuity and differences among VA, county, and university health care systems as determinants of patient-provider communication.