What do you want from your doctor, especially if you have a serious or life-threatening illness?
Researchers who conducted interviews a few years ago with 192 patients at the Mayo Clinics in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Rochester, Minn., identified seven “ideal physician behaviors.” Patients want their doctors to be “confident, empathetic, humane, personal, forthright, respectful and thorough,” the researchers wrote in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in 2006.
At the same time, of course, patients want their health problems properly diagnosed and competently treated. How, in the course of the 15 minutes that the typical patient gets to spend with a doctor, can all this happen?
With doctors increasingly pressed for time, how can they offer both the clinical expertise and the compassionate care that all patients deserve? And what can patients do to get what they most want from their doctors?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/health/09brod.html?_r=1&ref=health