I was listening to NPR on the radio last weekend and heard, This I Believe. The featured story was: Listening is Powerful Medicine by Dr. Alicia Conill. She offered a statistic that might surprise the general public, but is intuitively known to those of us in the field.
Studies have shown that it takes a physician about 18 seconds to interrupt a patient after they begin speaking. The doctor will take the conversation in the direction they feel it needs to go. When you see how busy most MDs are you can see why this happens; like many other professions they are doing more with less.
However, the research also shows that one of the side-effects of this is low patient-compliance rates with prescribed treatment plans.
via aginginplace.com