Thanks for the advice everyone... listening is definitely a big thing. The school keeps quoting that statistic, that the patient talks on average 8-12 (or lower!) seconds before the doctor interrupts and starts setting his or her own agenda. Horrifying!

The scary thing for me right now is that when time becomes an issue, how will I be able to listen well? I wonder if it is okay to ask people to come back just to talk. I still don't know how the scheduling works; typically in the outpatient setting I've seen 15 minutes for each patient and 30 minutes for a new one. Half of that is charting and paperwork bullcrap. And they're still an hour behind by the end of the day and people feel forgotten.

One of the doctors I admire most right now is a breast cancer specialist and she goes through patients fairly quickly (more quickly than I would feel comfortable with myself) but somehow they all leave feeling as if they got special treatment. I think it has to do with the way she talks to and respects people.

That's really terrible you had to go through that with fibromyalgia... it is certainly very real. My Mom has been a chronic pain patient for over 20 years now so through her, I can understand those frustrations. She always has to worry about being labeled as a drug seeker and because of that puts up with way too much. Someone shouldn't have to be so afraid to get their pain under control.

I'm not sure yet but I'm leaning towards family medicine. I know that I need something that will give me both variety and most importantly a chance to follow up on people for a long time. I don't want to do ER work where I might never get to find out what happens to the people I treat, nor would I like to do surgery where most of my patient time is spent with them asleep. :p As I understand, there is also a great need for more family medicine physicians.