Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

end of the medical interview. We encourage them to
pause, for quite a while if necessary, leaving the
patient enough psychic space to consider his or her
needs and perhaps the real agenda for being there.
This is often not what gets talked about first or
second, or even at all if the doctor isn't particularly
tuned in or is in a hurry.
At a faculty development session one day, some
experts from another institution were describing their
training program for the medical interview, which
uses videotaping to give the students direct feedback
on their patient-interviewing style. At one point, they
showed us a series of very short clips of just that last
question being asked from a number of different
interviews, each student simply asking one patient,
"Is there anything else you would like to tell me?"
Before showing these clips, we were assigned the
task of noticing and later reporting on what was going
on.
By the third one, I was doing everything I could to
keep myself from rolling on the floor with laughter. To
my surprise, there were a good many blank faces
although some caught on quickly. The same thing
was happening in clip after clip, but it was so obvious
that it was hard to see, just like lots of things that are
right under our noses.