New book explores physician burnout, patient communication

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Welcome in San Diego, it's Jade Hindmon. On this episode of KPBS Midday Edition, a new book lays out how breakdowns in communication can stand in the way of healthcare and how empathetic communication can fix that. This is KPBS Midday Edition, connecting our communities through conversation. [upbeat music] The US healthcare system has a lot of problems. Soaring insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs are pushing more and more Americans into medical debt. Many patients wait months for important appointments, and physician burnout has reached new highs in recent years. But my next guest argues there's another problem, a communication breakdown between patients and healthcare providers. Dr. Neil Farber is a retired professor of internal medicine at UC San Diego. Now, after 40 years of experience as a physician and a patient, he's out with a new book. It is called Treating a Broken System: A Physician's Cure for the Healthcare Crisis. Dr. Farber joins me now to talk about it. Welcome to Midday Edition.

Thank you very much.

So you, you approach this book from several lived experiences as a physician, as a patient, and as a family member, and I wanna start with that third perspective because this story begins with a doctor's visit for you, uh, and for, well, for your wife, Terry, really. What was that experience like for the both of you?

Oh, it was, um, devastating, is the only way to put it. Um, she had migraines for a long period of time, but there was a change. We went to see a neurologist who said, "Get a MRI," which we did. He called her while I was at work and told her that she had something abnormal in her brain, um, and said, "Go see a neurosurgeon right away." Um, that's the only thing she heard. Um, I sort of raced her m- home to be with her because she was absolutely in tears. Um, we went to see the neurosurgeon, who looked at her and said, "This is your tumor in this position, uh, uh, position. Here it is in this film. Uh, I can remove it and give you another layer, year or two of life, or I can do a biopsy and you go through chemio- chemotherapy." Um, she started crying. He just stood there and looked at her, and I held her and started crying myself. And I knew this was not the way to give bad news to people.

Mm-hmm. What do you think went wrong there in that?

I, you know, it- it's interesting because I had always been interested in communication with patients my whole career. Um, that was one of my areas of expertise and, and interest. And I never got taught how to give bad news because no one had ever come out with anything about doing that, per se. We, we knew about empathy, we knew about being with patients and communicating with them, but never giving bad news until, um, this guy named Robert Buckman came out with a book in 1992, uh, about how to give bad news to patients. Well, this was only five years later, so you wouldn't expect that