In The Hands Of Doctors: Touch And Trust In Medical Care
by Paul E. Stepansky /
2016 / English / PDF
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A movement has begun in medicine--one that oddly enough centers on an age-old theme: how to care for patients empathetically and therefore to "humanize" medicine again. This book revisits the meanings and actualities of medical care through a historical examination of medical practice stretching back to the 19th and early 20th centuries but focusing on the decades since the end of World War II. The goal is to show how the world of contemporary medicine has made the kind of caring associated with true doctoring much more difficult to achieve. Pinpointing reasons that range from doctors' diagnostic reliance on technology, to the manner in which medical educators try to "teach" empathy, to the impact of Facebook and patient satisfaction surveys on physician behavior, the book illuminates the contrast between the manner in which physicians typically cared for patients through the 1960s and how they are consigned to care for them now. Authored by esteemed medical historian Paul Stepansky, this book uses a comparative historical approach to illuminate the role of procedural medicine in caring the nature and goals of medical training the cultivation of empathy in doctors the meaning of friendship between doctor and patient in the postwar decades and now in the "friending" era of social media and the human dimension of medical technologies, old and new. Readers will grasp how contemporary physicians--especially primary care physicians--continue to care about their patients but are constrained by the realities of contemporary medicine in conveying their concern. Readers will also be able to consider from a new vantage point tough questions regarding the state of 21st-century American medicine: Are there ways in which medical technology can be rendered less intimidating and more "caring" to the patients who avail themselves of it? Is technologically based medicine really incompatible with the caring disposition of earlier generations of physicians?
