Ethan Tingey

Work of Art
Student Research Symposium Reflection
5.4.2016
Communication: Heath and Education
The need for successful communication between a patient and medical
provider is critical, whether the patient is from the same culture and
community or from differing locations and cultures. Kerri Buckley, a premedicine student at Portland State University gave an oral presentation from
10:00- 11:30 am about the importance of successful communication
between a medical provider and their patient or a health educator and their
student. The presentation was given in the Smith Memorial Student Union
building, room 326, on the Portland State campus. Kerri Buckleys hypothesis
was that if a medical provider or health educator is not competent in their
communication with their patient or student, then the ineffective and
confusing language exchanges can damage the alliance between patient and
physician or student and educator. The methodology for the research done
on the topic included a few case studies.
One case study was about an American doctor who had traveled
overseas to Africa for the first time. The doctor had little knowledge of the
social culture and language of the people he would be treating. When the
doctor had begun conversing with and treating his patients he noticed that
all of his patients seemed to be abnormally frightened. When the patients
were asked about their reactions by a native translator, all of the patients
declared something similar to being frightened by the inability to convey
their physical pain or inability to explain their anxieties about diagnosis or
treatment. The general rules for the communication between a doctor and a
patient of another culture are to observe subtle habits of the culture such as
whether or not eye contact is permitted, as well as the acceptable hand
gestures that are used to signal the commands such as come here or
stop, to understand views on pain tolerance and pain threshold, as well as
how pain is expressed, and to remember that understanding the words of a
language does not inevitably translate to understanding the modes of
thought of that specific culture. Another case study was about the time
when a strong stance on HIV was not yet adopted by governmental
leadership in Thailand, in the early 1990s. HIV/AIDS severely threatened
national health infrastructure and general stability of the country. In an

attempt to contribute to the national goals of HIV-transmission reduction, the

Peace Corps made efforts to provide condom demonstrations for local
villagers. However, these sessions were not ultimately successful and
depicted by the following quote In the old days volunteers used bananas in
the demonstration but switched to wooden replicas when they discovered
that some participants went home and actually put condoms on bananas
thinking it had some sort of power to keep them safe. The case studies
depicted the importance of better and successful communication between
patient and physician as well as health educator and student, thus Kerri
Buckleys findings supported her hypothesis.
I really enjoyed the oral presentation, since it was in relation to my
studies, and I found it not only helpful for health care, but for communication
in general. Communication is a huge element to society and is one of the
most important skills to have. One of my questions regarding the
presentation was about the lack of findings for the communication between
doctors, patients, educators, and students of the same culture and how
those finding may have been different.