A guy walks into the doctor’s office. “Listen, doc,” he says. “I got this terrible pain.” That’s the setup for an old gag with a million punchlines. But when a physician has only 15 minutes per patient visit, time spent listening may seem like a luxury, if not impossible. And that’s no joke.

A change is coming, says Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Elizabeth Rider, who recently traveled to NIH for Clinical Fellows’ Grand Rounds. In “Difficult Conversations: Evidence-Based Methods for Improving Outcomes,” she made the case for enhancing communication skills in medical encounters.

Traditionally, researchers have developed animal models in hopes of gaining insight into human disorders. Dr. Tracey Rouault has reversed this approach. She has developed a strain of mice with a fatal disorder of iron metabolism. She is now searching for people with the human version of the mouse disorder.