Lisa Sanders

"It's hard to listen to a story that's not told well. That's a terrible thing to say, but we all feel this. You know, when we're at the dinner table and Uncle Dave is telling a long, windy story, what you're really thinking is, "Where is this going? What is the bottom line?" That kind of impatience is not just limited to the dinner table; that's often how doctors feel. When you didn't have any other [diagnostic] tools except that story, you just buckled down and listened. But now that we have other [high-tech] tools, we feel like, "O.K., I'm out of here.""

"In response to the question "One of the recurring themes in the book [Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis] is the fact that too few doctors sit down and hear out the patient's story. Why is that?""