Put articulate physicians on one side and articulate attorneys on the other and the result is long, elaborately reasoned arguments for and against, in this case, restrictions on awards in malpractice cases. Here’s something considerably less freighted with detail:

In his new book “Blink,” author Malcolm Gladwell writes of the well-known work by researcher Wendy Levinson, who recorded hundreds of conversations between doctors and their patients. About half the doctors had never been sued; the other half were sued at least twice. Dr. Levinson found the group that had never been sued spent an average of three minutes longer with each patient than the doctors who were devoting part of their time to navigating the legal system.

More important, she found that those who didn’t get sued were more likely to inform the patient of what was going on and to say there will be time for questions later during that examination. These doctors were more likely

to solicit information, though they gave no greater detail about a patient’s condition. “The difference,” Mr. Gladwell writes, “was entirely in how they talked to their patients.”

There’s more. Another researcher, psychologist Nalini Ambady, took short slices of the conversations Dr. Levinson had recorded, removed high-frequency sounds from the tapes so that the words became unintelligible, leaving only pitch, intonation and rhythm, and then asked judges to rate the tapes for such qualities as warmth or hostility, dominance or anxiousness, Mr. Gladwell relates. The judges were able to pick out from just those short (10-second) slices of garbled words which doctors sounded dominant and less likely to listen – the group that got sued.

One other thing: The New York Times in January opined that “an authoritative study of thousands of the patients in New York State found that the vast majority who were harmed by medical errors never filed suit, whereas the vast majority of those who did file suit were not actually harmed by negligent doctors.”

Maine, like many states, will consider tort reform this year including caps on medical malpractice. If it is the case that, among many other issues, people sue doctors because of the tone of their voices but not often because of medical errors, then starting the debate with an argument over caps on awards seems beside the point. The debate might be better begun by talking about talking.