Back to

Page 138

Stealth Listening

We started this chapter with a discussion of the role listening plays in doctors’ diagnoses of illness and disease. Let’s consider the ways that listening skills and barriers affect the doctor-patient interaction and health care in general.

  • Effective listening involves thoughtful and intelligent active interactions with patients, not just a smiling bedside manner. For doctors like Erno Daniel, active listening means engaging patients, carefully assessing what they say, and inviting them to say more, a form of informational listening. On another level, Daniel’s diagnoses involve critical listening—a constant mental process of testing and refining alternate hypotheses that might explain the symptoms and findings at hand (Lawson & Daniel, 2010).
  • It’s not just the doctor who has listening responsibilities. Daniel (2008) provides worksheets to help patients inform their doctors about their symptoms and their lives. Patients should also come prepared to ask questions—What causes are possible? What tests could give clues? What multiple processes or conditions might be at work in my case?—and to carefully listen to the responses.
  • Listening apprehension is a huge barrier for many patients. They may be concerned or preoccupied with anxiety about their health, with fears that their concerns will sound foolish, or with feelings of embarrassment or modesty during a medical exam. Such situational and environmental concerns often intensify listening apprehension.