A new patient comes into a doctor’s office weighing 204 pounds. He’s six feet tall. The following conversation ensues:

Doctor: Is that up a little bit for you, weightwise?

Patient: It might be up a few pounds. I used to jog and I just haven’t ...

Doctor: See, ’cause I’m weighing more like 172, 173 and I’m six foot. And I’m still running. I’m doing the 5 and 10 and 15 K’s. The half marathons and ...

Patient: So, I’m 30 pounds heavier than you?

Doctor: Right now, yeah.

That, a group of researchers say, is part of an actual conversation they recorded in the course of a study that showed that many doctors waste patients’ time and lose their focus in office visits by interjecting irrelevant information about themselves.

Their paper, published yesterday in The Archives of Internal Medicine, involved 100 primary-care doctors in the Rochester area. As part of a study on patient care and outcomes, the doctors agreed to allow two people trained to act as patients come to their offices sometime over the course of a year. The test patients would surreptitiously make an audio recording of the encounter. The investigators analyzed recordings of 113 of those office visits, excluding situations when the doctors figured out that the patient was fake.