Q. I forward your electronic newsletter regularly to my husband, a doctor. He is skeptical about some of the entries because there are no names of the people submitting questions. How can we both be assured that you are not just making up the questions? As you can imagine, he is particularly peeved with the ones that disparage doctors!
A. We can certainly appreciate that your husband might be annoyed by critical questions. We assure you, though, that the questions in our column and website come from real people. We receive hundreds of inquiries every week at PeoplesPharmacy.com as well as through the mail, but most people prefer to keep their personal medical problems private. That’s why we don’t usually include names.
We wish that no one ever wanted to make any disparaging remarks about doctors. That would mean that doctors and patients were communicating well. Sadly, while many people are enthusiastic about their physicians, others feel frustrated because they don’t feel heard.
We have provided clear examples of breakdowns in communication and have offered solutions in our new book, Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them. We suspect that the title will aggravate your husband, but he might find the content of value. The goal of the book is to reduce the epidemic of medical mistakes that leads to so many preventable deaths in this country every year. Communication is one key ingredient, but there are many others. It might make a great present for a physician who really cares about improving patient safety.
