ABSTRACT
At a recent social gathering, friends were discussing the old chestnut about how doctors seemed to be so poor at talking to patients, especially breaking bad news.
‘If you ask me’, said one, ‘they train it out of them at medical school.’ However, the funny thing is, that those same people were quick to extol the
virtues of their own GPs. This is not a new phenomenon. If you read the press, doctors in general are hopeless at talking to patients - they talk down to them, they keep them in the dark and they don’t involve them in decision making - yet individual patients think that their own doctors do a great job.
