So Many Questions for Doctor, So Little Time for Patient

One cannot watch TV without hearing the ubiquitious, "talk to your doctor..."  gratuitous and hopefully self-serving advice from our big brothers at big pharma.

Here is some reality from a recent New York Times article:

Patients on routine visits to their primary care doctors often have a lot of questions but not enough time to get good answers.

Stuart Goldenberg

Time Allocation in Primary Care Office Visits (Health Services Research)

That is the conclusion of a group of researchers who reviewed videotapes of almost 400 visits in three medical settings. Their report appears online in the journal Health Services Research.

The problem is a result of pressure on doctors to limit visit lengths so they can see more patients, said the researchers, who were led by Ming Tai-Seale of the Texas A&M Health Science Center.

The patients whose visits were reviewed were 65 or older and had a range of incomes. The median time for visits, the researchers said, was just under 16 minutes.

During that time, patients tended to bring up six subjects. About five minutes was devoted to one major topic, with the others receiving as little as one minute.

“With only about two minutes of talk time on even the major topic from each speaker,” the authors wrote, “we could not help but wonder how much is accomplished during such a brief exchange.”