My own response to Dr. Karan’s observations was mixed. Everything he wrote made sense to me. And for 10 years, I’ve been grappling with this same question of why doctor-patient communication seems so fraught with potential misunderstanding, including my essays on the dangers of heart patients in denial, and women’s treatment-seeking-delay behaviors during heart attack. But something also seemed to be missing, and in my subsequent reader response to the BMJ, I described the missing bit as “the inherent hierarchy in medicine that supports this communication gap”.
Here’s what I wrote:
“While growing up in my family during the 1950s, I observed how deferential my parents, especially my mother, always were towards our longtime family physician, and of course towards any specialist that physician may have ever referred them to over the years.
