"I had naively expected the patient to ultimately accede to provider recommendations ... But trust is to meet a patient halfway, to walk alongside them, and to encourage them forward while never abandoning them,” writes medical student Ella Eisinger, a winner in this year’s American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation’s Building Trust Essay Contest. Her essay highlights how treating an older patient with complex medical concerns taught her important lessons in building patient trust, and “the power of a clinician’s authentic care to guide a patient toward a decision that will benefit their health." http://spr.ly/60449lEqK
Thank you Ella. Thank you Dr. Vine. "As long as medicine is an art its chief and characteristic instrument must be human faculty" Alfred Trotter English Neurosurgeon / Textbook of Medicine. Our ability to communicate with each other and to establish trust, diminish fear, and bring sensibility to our engagements, leads us towards acceptance and enlightens us to know and understand how to create openness in the patient clinician partnership. And yet there are not just gaps but deep crevasses in the healthcare system that disable caring clinicians from maintaining continuity of care and continuing to walk alongside the patient, whether literally or figuratively in keeping them from slipping and again falling, this time even deeper and harder into the crevasse that eventually may never release them back to us and to the loving arms and embrace of their family, friends and the caring touch (hopefully) of the next person they encounter if they are able to seek and find a place or that person to help care for them.
Physician/Practice Owner at Dermatology and Skin Surgery Center of Princeton, LLC
1moPatients are more apt to trust their physician when you treat them with respect and connect with them in some way. It goes beyond pure medical knowledge. It involves the art of medicine.