Abstract
Cognitive clinical reasoning and communication of the outcomes of that reasoning are necessarily and intimately entangled. Communication has a high affective component, as well as being complex and uncertain. Yet we often treat education in communication as if it were a jigsaw, refusing dynamism and complexity and readily taught as a protocol. While research findings indicate, for example, precisely how a good consultation may be conducted, this is hard to translate into practice because of unique contexts, but more so, because of ingrained structural restraints resulting from the hierarchical nature of medical culture.
Communication is an art as well as a science and needs to be practised with aesthetic considerations such as elegance and form in mind. Expert communication demands understanding of subtle processes of subtext at the level of the unconscious, embodied in rhetoric and non-verbal elements.
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Bleakley, A. (2014). How Physicians Think Can Be Judged from How They Listen and Speak. In: Patient-Centred Medicine in Transition. Advances in Medical Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02487-5_5
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