Instead of reading, could you also just listen …
The ideal vs the real world of communication:
It would be so nice if the transmission of information could always happen without any loss or alteration of the content during the process of transfer.
The ideal world
Can you imagine a world where communication works like this:
- The sender only speaks
- The recipient only listens
- Everything said is self-explanatory
- Everything is heard
- Everything is understood exactly in the way it was intended to be understood
Wow, that would be efficient, but … it is not reality.
The real world
The ideal vs the real world of communication underestimates, the complexity of the process of communication.
The real process of communication is flawed in every step of the process.
In the post about the “Concept of reality” I have indicated, how the same fact can lead to quite different interpretations.
There is a constant background noise on the line.
While the parent and the child are physically with you in the examination room, they are also mentally somewhere else altogether.
The mental background noise
In their minds, the parent and the child are in the middle of the storyline of their life.
And because we are speaking of children as patients, we would need to consider the parental and the child’s storylines as two separate aspects at the same moment!
With every communication, we have here at least three parties to the process. This is the real world of communication vs the ideal world.
What is that noise?
This storyline might be:
- worries
- preoccupations
- distractions, either related to the consultation
- or anything else that is going on in their lives the moment they meet you
In essence, our voice must be louder than their voice within! Be aware, we are not allowed to shout!
Parent and child come with assumptions about illness in general and the current problem in specific. Even their ideas are not necessarily the same!
How to punch through the distraction?
How to get from the real world of communication closer to the ideal world?
If we want to influence the patients and parents inner storyline, we need to know their thoughts throughout the consultation.
One might wonder whether this is possible, to know a person’s mind, whom one has never met before.
Unfortunately, a course of clairvoyance is missing on the schedule for medical school.
In general, there are some frequently recurring aspects of the train of thoughts of the parent, of the child and of us as the doctor in general.
These aspects are quite predictable, and I will describe them in the post “Perceptions of the consultation”.
In a nutshell:
Our current approach as doctors to communication appears to be ineffective. Our efforts are partially frustrated by mental background noise in the patient and parent.
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