Linguistic and Cultural Constraints in Vietnamese General Practitioners’ Act of Initiating Clinical Information-seeking Process in First Encounters with Outpatients

Abstract

Doctor-patient communication is crucial in medical care as it is the significant instrument by which information influential to doctor’s decisions of patients’ health condition, their treatment plan or further examinations is provided and exchanged. While extensive studies on doctor-patient interaction in Western cultures have been made from both medical and linguistic perspective and communication is culturally conditioned across languages and cultures, little research has examined doctor-patient communication in Southeast Asian contexts. This article reports the result of a study on Vietnamese general practitioners’ act of initiating information-seeking process in initial encounters with outpatients. Attempts have been made to understand Vietnamese general practitioners’ choice of utterances in this process from an interdisciplinary perspective. The findings suggest a need to integrate both linguistic and cultural knowledge into the communication skills training for medical students and further research on health communication from a multi-disciplinary perspective.