Managed care uses financial incentives and restrictions on tests and procedures to attempt to influence physician decision making and limit costs. Increasingly, the public is questioning whether physicians are truly making decisions based on the patient's best interest or are unduly influenced by economic incentives. These circumstances lead to the potential for disagreements and conflict in th...

The physician-patient relationship has changed throughout history, as the role of physician has been transformed. Modern physicians need to be educated on how to use highly specialized knowledge when approaching the patient as a unique and whole person living in a given psychological, social, and material context. This relationship evolved from a paternalistic model to a cooperative-deliberativ...

BACKGROUND Individuals with somatic preoccupation constitute a substantial number of primary care patients. Somatically preoccupied patients are challenging to primary care physicians for several reasons including patient complaints consuming a great deal of physician time, expense to diagnose and treat and strain on the physician-patient relationship. This paper examines and discusses how disr...

Physicians are trained to divorce personal feelings from professional duty and to avoid those patient encounters in which we playa dual or compromised role. Yet in practice, especially in those encounters where the physician-patient relationship is our chief therapeutic tool, emotion and conflict often arise. Rather than fearing their intrusions, we should understand them to be inevitable, info...