Poetry and Effective Patient-Centered Communication

Physicians ought to be skilled communicators, given the importance of the information necessary to convey to patients and their loved ones regarding the diagnosis and treatment of health conditions. Effective communication is associated with greater patient satisfaction and better health outcomes. Yet many clinicians are notorious for using too much jargon, interrupting frequently and redirecting, expressing harmful biases, and using closed-ended questions in encounters with patients. Might poetry, and especially its concision, be helpful in improving patient-physician communication? “Triple Bypass” is a poem so concise that it might at first glance seem inconsequential. Yet a close reading shows just how much can be communicated, and how seamlessly, using few and familiar words. The title of the poem is as clinical as the language gets, so the poem is easily accessible despite the gravity of the medical condition invoked; moreover, the clever contrast between the complexity of open heart surgery and the ostensible simplicity of the poem is telling, as it yields an important insight into how much information it might be possible to assimilate in such worrying scenarios. Another important ingredient for meaningful communication, empathy, is also subtly depicted here, in the familiarity and trust of “elbows quietly touching” in another contrast, this time with the all-consuming, interminably expressive technology of cellphones. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” Shakespeare famously wrote in Hamlet; perhaps poetry can remind us that sometimes saying less, and choosing our words carefully, can convey much more than we might realize.