A Conversation Analysis of Sensitive Talk in Clinic Interaction

Abstract

Nowadays, the relationship between the doctor and the patient in China is not so harmonious and medical disputes often occur. As we know, the communication between the doctor and the patient is not balanced, because the doctor has power to dominate the whole conversation. And when the topics of conversations are sensitive, the communication is becoming less fluent, and the patient is not willing to cooperate with the doctor or refuses to answer the questions, which causes some impacts on the conversation and is not favorable for the diagnosis of the diseases. Based on the tape-recordings and transcriptions of naturally occurring doctor-patient conversations in Chinese outpatient clinics, this paper analyses some data from different topics of sensitive talk, summarizes the respective sequence patterns and concludes some language features of such conversations, hoping to find some common characters in order to improve and better the relationship between the doctor and the patient, which can promote the diagnosis of the diseases.