Forbes March 16, 2021
True story: When I was a medical student, many of the patients I saw on rounds each morning had a lot of questions for me. Inevitably, however, they forgot to ask some of them. In the afternoons, I’d often pass a nurse in the hallway who would say something like, “Patient X says she’d like you to come back to her room because she forgot to ask you something.”
Often, when I went back to visit Patient X, she’d say something like, “Oh, yes, I had a question about what you said this morning…But I forgot what it was.”
I totally got it. These patients were in a hospital, often quite ill, and surrounded by strangers and odd...