Dr. Barr said he once conducted a personal experiment, deciding to let his next patient talk as long as he or she needed to without interruption. As it happened, the patient was a woman in her 70s who had been reluctant to seek care and was there only to appease friends and family. She talked of the weather, of a cough, of being uncertain about which drug to choose at the drugstore; her sister was a worrier, she told him. Despite frantic signals from his nurses that he was running behind schedule, Dr. Barr didn’t interrupt. The woman spoke for 22 minutes.

In the end, the woman’s diagnosis of lung cancer was bleak. Dr. Barr offered comfort, and the woman smiled at him. “I’ve had a good life. But I just wanted you to know — this is the best doctor visit I’ve ever had. You’re the only one who ever listened.”

Dr. Barr wrote an essay about the experience that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and says it made a lasting impression on him. While it’s not practical to spend that much time with every patient, it made him more thoughtful about listening.

“Every patient I treated after that, I was more careful to be sure that they were given the opportunity to tell me their story,” he said. “If I needed to guide the discussion, I tried to do it in a way that was more gentle. The fact that the doctor is hearing what you are saying and cares about you and understands what you are going through makes coping with the illness and the implications of the illness that much easier.”

Edna Haber, a retired mortgage company owner who lives in Westchester County in New York, said she has had wonderful male and female doctors, but her worst experiences have all involved male doctors. One male doctor was so dismissive of the medical history she gave him that she offered a copy of her medical record to prove her point and never went back. Another got angry when she seemed reluctant to take a medical test. It was just a scheduling issue, but “he started to scream at me,” she said.

Recently she decided to see Dr. Goldberg to discuss heart palpitations and feeling lightheaded. But a series of medical tests during the office visit found that her heart was normal. “I do believe that had I been with a male doctor, I think he just would have put his arm around me and said, ‘Listen, go home, relax, meditate, maybe take a tranquilizer,’ and that would have been the end of it.”

But Dr. Goldberg knew the patient had been concerned enough to see a doctor, so she suggested that she wear a heart monitor for a few days. Several days later, the technicians monitoring the feed noticed a pattern that ultimately showed Ms. Haber needed a pacemaker.

“She paid attention and treated me as if I was credible,” said Ms. Haber. “I wish all the women I know could understand how important it is to have a doctor who pays attention to them, whatever part of the body they are looking at. I think a lot of women are getting short shrift.”