LEWISTON – Today’s doctors need to sharpen their listening skills, according to one of the world’s leading researchers in cross-cultural psychiatry and global mental health who addressed a local audience Saturday morning.

Arthur Kleinman was the keynote speaker at the Maine Humanities Council’s day-long conference called “Imagine What It’s Like: Literature as a Bridge Between Cultures” which took place at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center. Kleinman is a major figure in medical anthropology and social medicine.

He explained that modern medicine has produced a distancing of the professional from the patient.

“There seems to be a thinning out of the moral experience,” Kleinman said. “This is potentially very dangerous, not just for medicine but also for our society and the whole world,” he added.

“It’s critical that we do better at getting at the history of the illness experience,” Kleinman said. He noted that recent studies show that an average doctor-patient interaction today is just 12 minutes, and when the doctor first asks the patient what’s happening, the patient has only 19 seconds to say how he’s doing. Furthermore, Kleinman said, a patient usually will voice three complaints, and it’s usually the third one that’s at the core of the problem.

“It’s astonishing that patients are so competent,” he said.

The speaker called for a renewed emphasis on “the humanness of interaction” and he urged professionals to recognize its importance and not be threatened by it.

Kleinman told the group that every patient has an elementary need to be heard and medical professionals must do more to acknowledgment and affirm a patient’s suffering and their need to communicate it.

“That is absolutely critical,” Kleinman said. “That is the contribution of the humanities. It balances technology.”

“My great hope is not for revolution,” Kleinman said, “but for a simple thing.” He said he hopes physicians and caregivers will be able to find “the space for self-reflection” which will allow them “to think about what we’re about to do.”

In his opening, Kleinman told how he had been conducting some surveys in which patients and family members checked off answers with ranges of 1 to 5. A mother of a young man who was dying came to Kleinman and, in blistering language, denounced his survey’s attempt to reduce an illness experience to scores. A person’s illness is often “a calamity” affecting many lives, she told him, and her outburst led him to an understanding of a “progressive sense of dehumanization” that’s taking place in modern medicine.

“When we change suffering into pathology, we lose the sense of suffering,” he said. He said people in today’s world, through television and magazines, have come to “delegitimize” suffering and to believe that there’s a surgical or pharmaceutical solution for every ill.

He said some medical professionals have even been known to prescribe drugs for depression in the last week of a dying person’s live, “as if they were not supposed to be depressed. These drugs need two to three weeks to take effect, he said, so it was like the professionals “were looking for a posthumous cure.”

While urging professionals to take the time to listen, he noted that “we create as many problems as we can handle, but he emphasized that “the meanings of suffering are incredibly important and need to be taken into account.”

In response to a member of the audience who asked, “How do we dig ourselves out?,” Kleinman said excessive commercialization must be avoided.

“We must begin with the right moral framing,” he said.

Kleinman’s talk, called “Suffering, Culture and Care: How the Moral Basis of Health Care is Threatened in our Era.” Kleinman was Harvard University’s Robb Professor of Anthropoly from 1991 to 2000, He has authored several books and has conducted research in China and Taiwan.

Participants and presenters at the conference included dozens of representatives of a wide range of medical disciplines. They came from all parts of Maine, and from as far as Boston and Washington, D.C.

The event was organized by the Maine Humanities Council as part of their program called “Literature and Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care.” The day’s program included discussion groups on selected books, articles and other reading related to literature’s role in healing. Rafael Campo, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, spoke on “The Poetry of Healing: Literature as a Cross-Cultural Connection.”

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