The standard process for starting anamnesis in the follow-up cancer consultation is for the doctor to ask a ‘How are you?’ question. This question gives the patient the opportunity to give a gloss of their general condition and offer the first topic of discussion. Findings in earlier analyses of US and UK data in a broad array of medical contexts show that the question is ambiguous and hence patients may interpret it as social rather than medical. A discourse analysis of a corpus of 28 video-taped consultations shows that the ‘How are you?’ question in the context of Dutch follow-up cancer consultations is consistently interpreted by both doctor and patients as a holistic medical question, making relevant a – frequently complex and nuanced – medically oriented response. We suggest that this difference may have to do with the interactional norms of hospital visits in the Netherlands, and with the specific contextual parameters of return visits, more specifically with follow-up cancer consultations, which affect the way the HAY question is placed, intended and understood.

中文翻译：

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癌症后续咨询的空缺：“你好吗？” 问题重温

在后续癌症咨询中开始病史的标准过程是让医生问“你好吗？” 问题。这个问题让患者有机会对他们的一般情况进行说明，并提供第一个讨论主题。早期对美国和英国数据在广泛的医学背景下的分析结果表明，这个问题是模棱两可的，因此患者可能会将其解释为社会而非医学。对 28 个视频咨询的语料库进行的话语分析表明，“你好吗？” 荷兰后续癌症咨询中的问题一直被医生和患者解释为一个整体的医学问题，使得相关的——通常是复杂和细微的——医学导向的反应。