Doctor Curmudgeon® Encounter? Please…No!
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By Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D. FAAP
Doctor Curmudgeon® has many gripes, irritations, things that annoy her.
Provider, of course, is a major offender. The grocery store provides food and staples. The utility company provides power to her home. The IT people provide software and technical support. And so on…and so on… and so on.
She is now piqued over the word “encounter.”
Doctor Curmudgeon® does not “encounter” her patients.
What on earth do the insurance companies and other entities think? What demeaning individual or group originated the use of this word to describe the synergy, the relationship, the communication between physician and patient? The give and take of the beautiful and thoughtful art of history taking: wherein the doctor listens to what the patient says, and the patient asks questions and describes what is happening within his body.
This is not the trivial word, “encounter.”
This is rightfully called a history.
To describe this as an encounter is another means to trivialize the relationship between patient and physician.
“Just listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.” This attribution to the great physician and educator, Dr. William Osler, roils around my cluttered brain quite frequently.
I recall a new patient being stunned as I sat down and talked with her, listened and asked questions. Leaving the room, I handed her a gown.
“What is this for?” she inquired.
She was surprised that I was going to examine her, because her previous physician (who turned out to be a physicians assistant) had merely looked at a form she filled out and then had the audacity to writer her a prescription.
Moreover, the patient told me that she could not remember when a doctor had sat down with her and had a conversation.
I guess she just had “encounters.”
I don’t mind the term “office visit.” This is descriptive and true.
Encounter!
It sounds as if I bumped into a patient in the hall! And so…
We had an encounter!
Doctor Curmudgeon® is Diane Batshaw Eisman, M.D., a physician-satirist. This column originally appeared on SERMO, the leading global social network for doctors.
SERMO www.sermo.com “talk real world medicine”
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