Miscommunication in Medicine: A podcast with Shunichi Nakagawa, Abby Rosenberg and Don Sullivan

Medical communication is tough, although fundamentally at its most basic unit of delivery, it includes really only three steps. First, a clinician’s thoughts must be encoded into words, then transmitted often via sounds, and finally decoded back to thoughts by a patient or family member. Simple, right? Not so much, as each one of these steps is fraught with miscommunication.

For example, a surgeon may want to convey that all visible tumors were removed during surgery, but transmits that message to the patient by saying “we got it all” only to have the patient hear an entirely different message that the cancer is gone and they are now cancer free.

On today’s podcast we talk with three communication experts, Abby Rosenberg, Don Sullivan, and Shunichi Nakagawa about the concept of miscommunication, including examples of it and ways we can mitigate this issue. 

This podcast was inspired by Abby and Don’s recent JAMA Oncology paper titled Miscommunication in Cancer Care—Do You Hear What I Hear?  We also ask Shunichi Nakagawa about some of the amazing communication pearls he posts on his Twitter account (don’t tell me to call it X).

Lastly, we also plan to have two more podcasts coming up on communication, one on the language of life sustaining treatments and one on surgical communication, so stay tuned!

Eric

Note: For more reading on this subject, check out these links:

Shunichi Nakagawa’s Twitter account

Miscommunication in Cancer Care—Do You Hear What I Hear?

Patient Values: Three Important Questions-Tell me more? Why? What else?

A "Three-Stage Protocol" for Serious Illness Conversations: Reframing Communication in Real Time