Eleven Effective Rules of Communication

1. Listen a lot.
2. Be specific.
3. Ask for a reasonable change that will relieve the gripe.
4. Make sure your partner understands what you want and you understand what she or he wants.
5. Deal with only ONE issue at a time.
6. ALWAYS consider compromise.
7. Never assume you know what the other is thinking. Check it out. Don't assume or predict reactions, rejections, or acceptance.
8. Accept what the other feels. Don't tell your partner what he or she should or should not be feeling.
9. Don't name call or label.
10. Sarcasm is dirty fighting - call each other on it.
11. Stay in the present. Grievances should be dealt with at the earliest possible moment. Don't save them up to use as weapons.

Great health relies on effective communication by everyone - patient, family, and health care team. Best health!

Medical TV: Where is the Health News Channel?

This was written three years ago, but is still relevant.

Medical information on TV is limited and stagnating. Sixty seconds on the news. Two minutes on the talk show after commercials on prescription medication. Outdated show on this channel, and outdated repeat on that channel in between the new show. Watch some on this channel then click and click to different channels to connect your medical news for today.

Remember the crawler at the bottom of the screen. Oh, you missed that there was a bird flu outbreak in Pakistan today, and that HPV vaccines will be required for teen women and men. These are the ways we learn about some of the most important news we should know. It concerns our health and public safety.

If only we had a dedicated medical TV CNN (instead of just Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s excellent show on early weekend mornings, or his occasional special). You know, like the sports channels by sport, the cartoon channels by age (and now one for the boomers!), the movie channels, government channels, and on and on. Where is the “MTV” of medical channels? Discovery Health has been carrying the TV health media for years. There should be more!

The TV box is probably the most used medium by which folks get their news and information. It is certainly a way to get information to people. The most used information source is one of the least used by the cutting edge medical field. This was noted in my research paper, “Building an American Health System”, in 2002. This is 2007, and it’s pretty much the same, maybe even less.

A medical TV channel (actually several would be optimal) would be great! A daily health news show would be a great start towards 24-7 medical TV. Envision yourself clicking to the heart channel, or to programs with content about specific diseases. You could learn more about that high blood pressure you are trying to control, and how you can monitor it at home. Topics on maintaining good health, and prevention of disease would be a click away. And if you missed a show, it would be shown again and again.

Health and medical coverage on TV is surely lacking in this consumer driven health conscious society. We can watch as much sports, cartoons, movies, news as we want, but we still have to piece together our medical news and supplement it with the written word, or health care providers’ spoken word. And radio.

Great health is true wealth. Medical TV would make us even richer.


by J.L. Richardson, MD, family medicine physician, patient advocate and caregiver, and author of Patient Handbook to Medical Care: Your Personal Health Guide,


http://www.mypatienthandbook.com/

www.twitter.com/MD4U

COMMUNICATION GAP

Look how long it took health officials to find a man with infectious extreme drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) after “talking” with him about his condition. Did they tell him that he was and that he could not travel? In the taped (taped by his father) conversation with the doctor, the doctor said, “There is no reason for you to be sequestered”. The letter telling him he was infectious and not to travel arrived after he left the country. Did anyone try to call him, email him, text him or his immediate family?

Communication and comprehension are not the only issues here. Look how long it took to get to this point. The gentleman was alerted that he may have a severe form of TB back in April. It is now June. There is some hesitancy here. He was initially diagnosed, according to his TV interview with “The King”, Larry King, that he was diagnosed with TB over a year ago. Treatment until May had been stable, uneventful. Now he faces long term treatment, and possibly part of his lung may have to be removed.

Communication is the number one item that patients say hinder their health care. They rarely get to tell their whole story before the doctor interrupts. It gets to a point where you don’t understand what your health providers are saying, and you just do what you think they told you. Or do you?

If the “big dogs” like the CDC and health departments have problems in talking to patients so that they understand, where does that leave the rest of us?

Communication is the fifth vital sign (the others are blood pressure, temperature, pulse rate, respirations). Understanding what is said is part of this. Talk much. Listen more. Ask to repeat. Ask questions. Write it down. Or tape it.