A doctor may interrupt you because he or she is on the clock. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Apparently it takes mammals on average 21 seconds to pee regardless of their size, based on Georgia Tech researchers watching different animals urinate. Therefore, you may have much more uninterrupted time to empty your bladder than you do to tell your doctor why you are seeing him or her on a visit.
A study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine showed how soon doctors interrupt their patients during appointment and how many don't even give their patients a chance to first explain the reason for the visit. Before you say anything and ask any questions, let me continue.
For the study, a team recorded and analyzed 272 randomly selected patient-doctor encounters at the Mayo Clinic and affiliated clinics in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The majority of the time the doctor did not even ask the patient the purpose of the visit: 64% of primary care visits and 80% of specialist visits.
Even when doctors gave patients the opportunity to explain the purpose of the visit, most of the time doctors interrupted the patient: 19 (63%) of the 30 primary care encounters and 8 (80%) of the 10 specialty care encounters.
These interruptions came pretty quickly: a median of 11 seconds with a range of 3 seconds to 234 seconds. (3 seconds?!?) And most of the time (59%), the interruption wasn't something like “I see, tell me more” or “that must be hard for you” or “I really have to go pee” but instead a closed-ended question, that is, a question just seeking a “yes” or “no” response.
How then can a doctor really tell why you are there and provide proper care? Even the best medical record systems can't always provide enough information on a patient before a visit. Last I checked mind reading is not part of any medical record system, although who knows what Google is working on these days.
After all, you may want to wait until you actually see your doctor before fully revealing and explaining the purpose of your visit. Think about it. Would you tell the appointment scheduler that you have intense and uncontrollable farting? Would you tell the receptionist at the clinic with others in the waiting room that you have intense and uncontrollable farting, unless, of course, they have already noticed? Moreover, telling someone about intense and uncontrollable farting in 11 seconds or less can be like releasing one in a room and then immediately leaving. Without the opportunity to offer more accompanying details, brief statements can lead to lots of misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
A doctor's visit shouldn't feel like a Shark Tank pitch. In fact, guests on that television show typically get more time to talk uninterrupted than 11 seconds.
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