Miscommunication in Medicine: A podcast with Shunichi Nakagawa, Abby Rosenberg and Don Sullivan

GeriPal - A Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine Podcast · Sep 28, 2023 · 49m

Medical communication is tough, although fundamentally at its most basic unit of delivery, it includes really only three steps. First, a clinician's thoughts must be encoded into words, then transmitted often via sounds, and finally decoded back to thoughts by a patient or family member. Simple, right? Not so much, as each one of these steps is fraught with miscommunication.

For example, a surgeon may want to convey that all visible tumors were removed during surgery, but transmits that message to the patient by saying "we got it all" only to have the patient hear an entirely different…