FROM THE THIRD GENEVA CONFERENCE ON PERSON-CENTERED MEDICINE: PERSON-CENTERED CLINICAL CARE ACTIVITIES Person-centered Therapeutics

A clinician’s effectiveness in treatment depends substantially on his or her attitude toward -and understanding of -the patient as a person endowed with self-awareness and the will to direct his or her own future. The assessment of personality in the therapeutic encounter is a crucial foundation for forming an effective working alliance with shared goals. Helping a person to reflect on their personality provides a mirror image of their strengths and weaknesses in adapting to life’s many challenges. The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) provides an effective way to describe personality thoroughly and to predict both the positive and negative aspects of health. Strengths and weaknesses in TCI personality traits allow strong predictions of individual differences of all aspects of well-being. Diverse therapeutic techniques, such as diet, exercise, mood self-regulation, meditation, or acts of kindness, influence health and personality development in ways that are largely indistinguishable from one another or from effective allopathic treatments. Hence the development of wellbeing appears to be the result of activating a synergistic set of mechanisms of well-being, which are expressed as fuller functioning, plasticity, and virtue in adapting to life’s challenges