The healing power of a good doctor

I've begun to think that medical schools should have two graduation ceremonies. One is for medicine. The other is for 'Putting Patients at Ease 101.' The first earns you a licence to practise, while the second earns you patients who look forward to seeing you again.
If you've ever sat in a waiting room rehearsing what you're about to say, you'll know exactly the kind of doctor I'm talking about.
You walk into the consultation room already feeling anxious, only to be greeted by a face that suggests you've personally ruined the doctor's day. You start wondering whether you should apologise for being ill or simply offer to come back after lunch.
You begin explaining your symptoms, but before you've reached the interesting part, you're interrupted because, apparently, your illness has exceeded the maximum speaking time allowed.
Meanwhile, the doctor is typing away with such determination that you begin wondering whether they're writing your medical notes or trying to qualify for the World Typing Championships. I've often been tempted to ask, 'Doctor, should I come back after you've finished talking to your keyboard?' Sometimes I'm not sure which one of us has the appointment.
Fortunately, that's not the kind of doctor I remember most. I remember another consultation when I walked in worried. The doctor smiled, listened without interrupting, asked a few sensible questions and explained everything in language I could understand. They somehow managed to translate 'medical' into 'human.'
I walked out with a prescription, but what stayed with me wasn't the medicine. It was the feeling that everything was going to be all right. The tablets did their job, but so did the doctor.
Before doctors decide to remove my name from their appointment books and blacklist me, let me make something clear.
I have enormous respect for them. In fact, my three daughters are medical doctors, so I have a front-row seat to the sleepless nights, difficult decisions and enormous responsibility that come with the profession.
This isn't an article about criticising doctors. It's about celebrating the ones who make medicine more effective by the way they treat people.
Of course, you might say this is all common sense. Yes, kind of, but even researchers have been investigating the same question.
In 2009, the journal 'Medical Care' published a meta-analysis that combined 127 separate studies from around the world. The researchers found that patients whose doctors communicated poorly had a 19-per cent higher risk of not following medical advice. When doctors received communication-skills training, their patients became 62 per cent more likely to follow treatment correctly. The medicine hadn't changed, but the conversation had. Bedside manner isn't just something our grandparents talked about. Scientists have been measuring it too.
A 2023 systematic review found that doctors who communicate with empathy build greater trust, improve patient satisfaction and are associated with better health outcomes.
In 2025, researchers analysing data from the US National Survey of Children's Health found that poorer communication was linked with more emergency department visits and hospital admissions among children.
Researchers in South Korea studied nearly 1,000 adults and found that empathetic doctors inspired greater trust and made patients more willing to accept medical advice. Although the studies were done in different countries and different healthcare systems, the findings pointed in exactly the same direction.
It makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Doctors spend years learning to interpret X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, ECGs and blood tests. They can detect the faintest heart murmur and diagnose diseases that most of us struggle even to pronounce. Sometimes, however, the most important thing isn't on the scan or the monitor; it's sitting in the chair opposite them. Anxiety doesn't appear in a blood test, and worry doesn't show up on an MRI, but every patient brings both into the consultation room.
Imagine two patients with the same illness. They receive the same diagnosis and the same prescription. One leaves convinced the worst is about to happen. The other leaves feeling reassured and hopeful. The tablets are identical, and the dosage is identical. The difference isn't the prescription but the consultation.
I can't remember the names of most of the medicines I've taken over the years, but I remember many of the doctors. I remember the one who barely looked at me. I remember the one who made me feel rushed. More importantly, I remember the ones who somehow managed to make me feel that, for those few minutes, I was the only patient who mattered. I've forgotten the name of the antibiotic they prescribed, but I've never forgotten how they treated me.
So, to all the doctors who smile before they speak, listen before they interrupt, and reassure before they prescribe, Thank You! You may never know how much difference those small moments make, but we (your patients) do.

DR KHALFAN AL HARRASI

The author is an academic and researcher