How To Communicate With Patients

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If you are a doctor or a nurse - or anyone else in the health care field - one of the most important aspects of your job will be knowing the right way to communicate with your patients. And even though it is usually a fairly straightforward exercise to effectively communicate with your patients (and while you have been trained in how to handle most of the "non-straightforward" situations), one of the areas that causes many health care professionals to stumble is communication with those from different backgrounds or beliefs regarding medicine.

There are many patients who will come to you from an ethnic, religious, or belief-system background that flies counter to all the things conventional medicine says, and this background will lead them to make health-related decisions that are counterproductive to the result they are hoping to achieve. The mistake many health care professionals make is assuming that all they have to do is show these patients the "error of their ways," and that this will cause these patients to change their approach to medicine - but actually, this can often offend such patients, pushing them further into their counterproductive decisions.

As a health care professional, it will be important for you to be aware of the different backgrounds you are likely to encounter in the area where you work, and to have an understanding of why these people believe the things they believe. You will be able to meet your patients at a "halfway point" when you gain such an understanding, displaying to them the fact that you understand where they are coming from in their thinking, and showing them all the ways in which conventional medicine intersects with their way of thinking.

You can become an ally to your patients instead of being an enemy to their way of thinking when you approach them in this manner, and this will enable you to communicate with them in an effective manner, so that they change to a more productive approach toward medicine, without getting offended!