Listening in health care: a humanities task. From the editorial:

The culture of evidence-based medicine is reductive, it simplifies and cannot handle the complexities of life that need to be interpreted and put in context. Evidence-based medicine devalues individual experience…. Actually, being a humanities student made me react to this hierar­chical structure very strongly and it made me lose faith towards the realm of health care and start to question their knowledge production. If they can’t listen properly what else are they getting wrong about medicine as a scientific field? Are health care providers not supposed to be humani­sts too? My idea of humanist is about meeting the other and this kind of reasoning can be found in diffe­rent philosophical schools of thought….

Medical humanities research has also explained that to get the right diagnosis the patient and health care provider need to be on the same page when it comes to the use of words and their interpretation and how they are applied to make sense to each other. Not just that, Iona Heath explains in an essay in the BMJ: “Clinicians need to be just this – experts in the feelings we attach to words – otherwise our efforts to communicate with our patients will oscillate between the tedious and the cruel.”… 

It is not about the lack of soft skills. I just need to look closer at what narrative medicine is about and the threat against it to understand how hard listening in health care is…. The bigger problem against listening in health care is what is being said and can be taught in medical education classes…. When practitioners train medical students in the health care setting, they also teach them how not to listen. If a medical student tries to be attentive and let the patient speak from beginning to finish the teaching practitioner, will make sure to correct the medical student and then make sure to show how the patient’s voice is not allowed by being interrupted as soon as possible. This is just one part of the problem with listening in health care. Other sides of these non-listening behaviors are actually even stranger than what has just been said. Doctors are train­ed to think thematically and they at times do not even let the patients explain themselves. Doctors are not trained in how to make meaning out of how a patient narrates. Already just on their way to greet a patient in the waiting room they can have decided beforehand what the pati­ent has or that patient does not have anything at all.