How long will your doctor listen to you?

You’ve been having some health issues, and you’ve been thinking about them constantly for the last three months. You finally got an appointment with the doctor, and you plan to go in and tell them everything that’s been happening so they can make a proper diagnosis and get you the treatment that you need.

But how long is your doctor actually going to listen to you? You may have enough to say to talk for an hour straight on this topic, but is the doctor actually going to absorb all of that information and make the right diagnosis because of your observations?

The average is just 11 seconds

Unfortunately, studies have found that the average amount of time a doctor listens to a patient is merely 11 seconds. After that, doctors start interrupting and trying to guide the conversation on their own.

This is just an average, so everyone may have different experiences, but it shows that doctors certainly are not taking a long time to listen to their patients before interrupting them. This does raise questions about exactly how much those doctors know about the patients’ conditions or how well prepared they are to make a diagnosis.

If it turns out that your doctor makes the wrong diagnosis or makes some other type of error, you may feel that the problem is simply that they didn’t listen to you and they didn’t gather the information that they needed. They were negligent and they didn’t provide you proper care because they were in too much of a rush or they were just too busy.

A situation like this can be very frustrating, so it’s important to know if you have a right to financial compensation due to the doctor’s mistake.