Every time you go to the doctor, he or she will be taking a medical history. Only sometimes it doesn’t look like they’re doing anything but sitting there listening to you. In reality, they are executing a strict protocol, manipulating you for information by asking you leading questions and occasionally allowing you to babble. Sometimes you’ll flippantly mention something that seems incidental to you, but has just cemented your entire presentation in the eyes of the doctor. Since you are completely unaware of the protocol and the flow of questioning, the doctor has to outmaneuver you to remain on track.
Why am I going on about doctors and medical histories?
For the past 6 (and possibly even more) weeks, we’ve been learning how to take a medical history in our Doctor & Patient sessions. Apparently something like 90% of a diagnosis is made off the medical history alone, so it’s no wonder that this exercise will continue to be drilled into us for many more weeks to come.
In our sessions, we are divided into ‘doctors’ and ‘patients’, and the ‘doctors’ prepare themselves for questioning while the ‘patients’ are given a sheet of responses to give. The ‘doctors’ introduce themselves, and begin questioning the ‘patients’ as though they had come to see them for the first time. Of course there’s a bit of silliness involved: “Do you use any illicit or recreational drugs” to which the reply will always be something in the vein of “No doctor, just some meth with my grandkids every now and then.”
After the questioning is finished, we must present our patient to the class, and this can sometimes be a tedious process as the class shares three cases and ‘oh – haven’t we heard this one already?’ After the presentation (which you rocked out), the only real doctor in the room will nod and say: “And what was his occupation?”
You stare blankly and of course that immediately tells everyone that you don’t know, because you didn’t ask. You admit this to the group and think to yourself: “thank god I didn’t forget to ask about allergies or something,” when the real doctor says: “your patient works in a nuclear power plant.”
Shit. Fuck. Of course, he couldn’t have been a bricklayer.
Thankfully this is a theoretical session and I’m supposed to get it wrong (though getting it right sometimes might be nice), but here’s what we look for when questioning a patient, so you can give us newbies a bit of a hand…
