Interrupting Patients in Healthcare Settings: What is Being Interrupted?

Scientific literature since the 1980s examines the phenomenon of healthcare professionals interrupting patients: at which second patients opening expositions are interrupted and how long they take if unrestrained. Although the goal of this literature is strictly numerical—determining interventions’ length—, it reveals a number of its authors’ views and preferences. Our discourse analysis reveals, first, that, often in between the lines, this literature suggests reasons for letting patients speak freely and tries to dismantle the myth of the overly-loquacious patient. Second, by turning to some philosophical inquiries into the notion of “interruption,” we explore how, within this literature, the ultimate reason for interrupting patients and silencing several of their concerns is often the fear of a certain medical logic being interrupted—a logic that dates back to Vesalius and Bichat, and that informs nowadays biomedicine: patients’ speech is valuable as long as it contributes to a diagnosis in the form of the identification of an underlying tissue damage. That is, this literature presents the interruption of patients as a device of claiming power on the part of an eminently biomedical approach to illness. The paper provides further reasons for not interrupting patients proposed by the biopsychosocial model, “narrative medicine,” and anthropologists who study the functions of illness narratives.