When you go visit your doctor, you expect them to listen to you carefully. You understand your health in a way that no one else does, and you need to relate any issues that you may be having to a medical professional. This is the only way to get a proper diagnosis and to get the treatment that you need.
But, when you go, you often feel like the doctor just interrupts you. They’re not fully listening to everything that you have to say. Is this just in your head or is it something that actually happens?
Studies back this up
It is definitely not just in your head, as studies have shown that doctors often interrupt their patients. In one study, the median amount of time before that interruption was clocked at just 11 seconds. Most of the time, doctors would cut off their patients around this point.
Some patients were not interrupted at all. You may find this to be a good thing at first, but the study was careful to note that most of them only talked for roughly six seconds. This may mean that the doctor would have interrupted them if they had gotten to the 11-second mark, but they simply did not talk long enough to be interrupted.
Neither of these stats are encouraging for you. Either your doctor is probably going to interrupt you so that you can’t say what you came to say, or you’re going to have to be so brief that they don’t have time to interrupt you, meaning that you’re also not going to relate all of the pertinent information. If this leads to a medical mistake that causes an injury or causes your condition to get worse, then you may need to carefully consider your legal options.
