Attaching a New Understanding to the Patient-Physician Relationship in Family Practice

Attaching a new understanding to the patient-physician relationship in family practice.

BACKGROUND As a result of continuity of care with patients and their families, family physicians are uniquely poised to form enduring clinical relationships with their patients. The degree of collaboration in and satisfaction with the patient-provider alliance has been shown to have important implications for treatment outcomes across a range of medical problems. Providing optimal care can requ...

The physician-patient relationship--perspectives after 40 years of family practice.

[The patient-physician relationship: towards humanization of medical practice].

Based on a literature review, this article discusses the physician-patient relationship by presenting anthropological and communicational approaches, physicians' experiences as patients, key concepts showing the need for humanization of the patient-physician relationship, and some theoretical-philosophical reflections relating primarily to hermeneutics. Based on this framework, one can already ...

The Patient-physician Relationship

DURING THE 1980S, RENEWED interest in the patientphysician relationship and the availability of more sophisticated audio and video technology allowed investigators to explore medical discourse in unprecedented detail. One of the most frequently quoted studies from this period (Beckman and Frankel) suggested that patients, asked to describe their concerns by a physician, were most often redirect...

Restoring intimacy to the physician-patient relationship.

A young woman came to see me a few days ago, a former patient now in her twenties. She will die soon; nothing can be done. We shared some recollections of the years when I was her pediatrician, and she expressed some regrets that she was to have no future. But she shed no tears. Still, I cannot forget her eyes staring into the distance as though searching for a way to cry. Momentarily, she smil...