Clinical Practice, Patient-Physician Relationship and Computers

Abstract

Despite that technology organizes most tasks at lower costs and higher efficiency, human communication uses speech intonation, listening attitude and body language. As a special type of communication, the patient physician relationship enacts a particular exchange that simultaneously uses multiple languages and codes, all typical of human interaction. Patient physician relationship, even more so than other human communication, is based on the fact that the sender is able to perceive what the receiver perceives of the sender’s own perception. In addition to gestures, body language, glances and barely perceptible elements like perspiration, the smell of skin and piloerection, clothes also communicate, such as white gowns worn by health care personnel, or the stethoscope. In the words of Lacan, two desirers meet during patient physician relationship: one that needs to be healed and other who needs to heal in an act of giving which comforts both. Through communication, physicians channel their power in a beneficial way: the introduction of computers may alter this channel. Computers in Medicine, as they are currently used, could become an obstacle for a proper patient physician relationship which may become alienating and the “other” disappearing as a person. Communication is then transformed into a sterile interaction ignoring the other’s dignity which turns the patient into a machine-toy-cog. It is because of this, that some clinicians state that the most important element in the consultation room is not the stethoscope, nor the computer, but the chair.

Translated by Juan Diego Ormaechea and Franco Simini