Authors:
  • The freedom of patient speech is necessary if the doctor is to get clues about the medical enigma before him. If the patient is inhibited, or cut off prematurely, or constrained into one path of discussion, then the doctor may not be told something vital. Observers have noted that, on average, physicians interrupt patients within eighteen seconds of when they begin telling their story.

    Jerome Groopman (2008). “How Doctors Think”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt