Talking Back to Your Doctor
The Checkup from Slate and WBUR on why it’s so hard, and so important, to question your physician.
Listen to Episode No. 6 of The Checkup: Talking Back to Your Doctor
The Checkup is a new health podcast, a collaboration between Slate and WBUR, Boston’s NPR News Station. You’ll find all six episodes on The Checkup’s individual feed.
Welcome to The Checkup. Our sixth episode, "Talking Back to Your Doctor," opens with a question: Why do so many of us find it so hellishly hard to speak freely with our doctors? What is it about a white coat that makes even normally assertive people clam up?
We begin with the dramatic story of Alicair Peltonen, an administrative assistant diagnosed with a rare cancer who had to have a chunk the size of a baseball removed from her thigh. Throughout her medical saga, she found that she often had urgent questions echoing in her mind, but felt too inhibited to voice them. She set out to discover why. We speak with Dr. Jo Shapiro of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston about what she calls "Conversation Deficit Disorder" among doctors. And we hear from Dr. Annie Brewster, who has special insight into doctor-patient communication because she's both a practicing doctor and a multiple sclerosis patient who decided not to follow her doctor's recommendations about taking a particular medication.
Your hosts are Carey Goldberg and Rachel Zimmerman, former newspaper reporters and co-producers of WBUR's CommonHealth blog. Each episode of The Checkup features a different topic—previous topics included college mental health, sex problems, the Insanity workout, and vaccine issues.
The Checkup Podcast is produced at WBUR by George Hicks.
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