Paging Dr. Friendly

June 12, 2007 — -- For 29-year-old Kirran Bari of Boston, prescriptions and medical tests aren't enough to make her feel completely comfortable around a doctor she has just met.

What does she demand? A friendly introduction, for starters."With the initial greeting, you can tell whether your doctor is genuinely interested," Bari says. "You notice that first impression."

And Bari may not be the only one who prefers a more personal approach from a physician, a new study suggests.The research is published in the latest issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

Gregory Makoul and his colleagues at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine surveyed more than 400 patients in 48 states to find out what patients prefer during an initial encounter with a doctor. The authors reviewed 123 videotaped patient visits to see what the 19 doctors at two study sites actually did during an initial visit.

What they found was that nearly 80 percent of the patients surveyed want to shake their doctor's hand -- and about half prefer that their physician use their first name during that initial encounter."Doctors are told to greet patients appropriately, but we rarely tell them exactly what to do," says Makoul. "The point of this study was to provide evidence to help doctors know what to do."

Doctors seemed to comply with the hand-shaking demand Makoul's group identified. The physicians they followed shook hands with patients in over 80 percent of their visits. "I prefer that they shake my hand because I am concerned with not just being treated as a disorder," says 66-year-old L. Robert Griffin of New Hope, Pa. "I prefer some sort of normal-person contact."

Indeed, many physicians see shaking hands as essential to the personal relationship between patient and doctor."It is frankly critical that the first meeting include shaking hands with the patient and with any family or friends they have brought," says OBGYN Dr. Joanna Cain, director of the Center for Women's Health at Oregon Health Sciences University.