Doctors are listening less and generalizing more.
A friend recently visited her doctor. She told me that at one point, while she was telling him her problem, he looked mostly at his computer screen, tapped on the keyboard, took a short phone call, and made adjustments to the automatic blood-pressure device.
A lot of people call this "multitasking"; I think it's distraction.
My friend's doctor wasn't doing what he was doing because he was indifferent to her; he was doing what he was doing because doctors are swamped with too many patients, all the work involved in treating those patients, and evermore real and virtual paperwork forced on them by the demands of bureaucracies.
Nonetheless, there's an ethical issue here. The doctor did have some choices. He could try to do several things at once, or he could do them in turn, even if that meant allowing a little less time for each. And the phone call seems to me unacceptable; it shouldn't have been connected by the secretary short of an emergency.
What her doctor owed my friend first and foremost was to listen to her. Even if he had to impress on her the need to be brief, he should above all have paid attention to her complaint. Once he understood that much, the rest could be dealt with.
I've written before on our obligation to listen but in a doctor's case the obligation is much more serious. There's too much reliance now on "evidence-based medicine" or what I prefer to call "one size fits none" practice. Basically, doctors pick up on key terms and run through a list of likely conditions ordered by statistical results. This is assembly-line thinking and unless you happen to be the precisely average patient, you're ill-served by it.
At the root of the problem is the computer-model of the mind, the conviction so many have that human beings can multitask with the best of Windows or Mac systems. Down the line we'll probably all be typing in symptoms on our laptops and desktops and complex programs will be associating our complaints with likely pathological conditions. We might see a doctor only when we "present," as they say, at a treatment center. I'm sure that's coming, and no amount of worry about ethical issues or obligations will stop it. But for now, so long as getting medical attention means talking to someone, they should listen.
My thanks to Anne.
