How is your appetite?
Terrible. I’m not hungry at all.
So if your appetite’s not good, you’ve been eating less?
Yes, much less.
Have you lost any weight?
Well done, doctor. You’ve trapped your patient. You got them to say they’re not hungry, they’re not eating at all, and then you spring the weight loss question. How can they answer “No, I haven’t lost any weight” without looking a liar?
So you’re likely to get a “Yeah, I think maybe I have lost a little weight,” even though that thought never entered their head until you planted it.
I did this accidentally in Kisoro recently, so i had to discount the response and ask it later. But I know that there are some doctors do this intentionally, when they have an particular outcome they want to attain. If, for example, you have to document that the patient has been having weight loss so you can send him to medicine rather than surgery (or the other way around), this line of questioning is a great way to get there.
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