But he is a busy doctor. Besides treating 40 to 65 patients a day, he tells me that he volunteers at a clinic in a low-income neighborhood on weekends. From the waiting room, I watch him run from one patient to the next. It dawns on me to ask him if he even takes a lunch break. He doesn’t. I calculate that in an eight-hour period he has only seven to 12 minutes for each patient — an impossible situation for any doctor. In the past year, two more retina specialists have told me that their work schedule is equally hectic.

But I am overwhelmed, too. When I first started having vision problems, I was given a diagnosis of wet macular degeneration. I religiously took a nutritional supplement called AREDS 2, which a major study from the National Eye Institute had shown could slow the progression of the disease. It was only when I went online to research degenerative myopia that I learned something that my doctors did not tell me. The kind of wet macular degeneration that I have, caused by my degenerative myopia, is different from the far more common age-related macular degeneration that afflicts so many older adults. AREDS 2 would not do anything to preserve my vision.

Members of the low vision support group that I facilitate tell me they have had similar experiences with doctors. They complain that doctors sometimes don’t explain what’s going on with their eyes and avoid giving them bad news.

A member once told her doctor about our low vision support group, and she was surprised to hear him complain. “Why is it that some of my patients seem ignorant about their eye condition?” Doctor, doctor, she thought, why are you asking me? Aren’t you the one who is supposed to do the explaining? But it’s more than just lack of information.

Nature, life experience or both endow some doctors with excellent bedside manners. Others, however, need help. In recent years, some medical schools, like Columbia and Duke, and hospitals, like Massachusetts General, have begun to train doctors in the art of empathy after evidence-based research demonstrated its power to improve patient outcomes and reduce doctor errors, malpractice suits and physician burnout. Especially noteworthy is that training doctors in empathy produces happier doctors.

Sadly, many doctors remain empathy illiterate. The unfortunate consequence is that some doctors can be excessively blunt, or, in my case, saying nothing at all. Either can result in confusion and suffering.

For example, a close friend who fainted in a restaurant woke up in a hospital and was abruptly told by an oncologist that she had lung cancer and only three months to live. The doctor told her she needed to make a will, pack her clothes and move into the nearest hospice. “It was harsh,” my friend said. Ten months later she is still alive.