What Patients Teach

This an outstanding contribution to the ethics literature * thoughtful, analytic, original, and exceptionally attuned to the dynamic, 'doubled-agency' aspects of the doctor-patient relationship. Combining profound insight with empirical data gleaned from in-depth interviews, the authors challenge the received wisdom that the abstract framework of principled-centered ethics will suffice to solve clinical problems. All those involved in conducting and teaching ethics consultations will benefit from this book.Larry Schneiderman, Professor Emeritus, Medicine and Family & Preventive Medicine, University of California, San Diego *
The near-universal complaint among disappointed patients is, 'My doctor doesn't listen.' Churchill, Schenck, and Fanning let the patients themselves tell us exactly what it means to listen within the context of a truly therapeutic relationship, thoughtfully describing the unglamorous, everyday world of solid medical practice. Along the way, they force us to rethink many of our assumptions about what most matters ethically in health care. * Howard Brody, John P. McGovern Centennial Chair in Family Medicine and Director, Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch *
What Patients Teach, with its companion volume, Healers, gives health-care professionals the clearest, most practical, best researched guide to relationships with their patients. Few books offer as constructive a vision of what clinical care can be. The authors' concluding call for a reorientation of bioethics to focus on patients' vulnerability deserves to debated and, I hope, implemented. These books are essential reading for anyone concerned with the humane delivery of health care. * Arthur W. Frank, author of The Wounded Storyteller (new edition, 2013) and Letting Stories Breathe *
This is an essential book in medical ethics. Drawing on extensive interviews, the authors emphasize the patient's agency and the body's belonging to a community, and they see the trust that's central to the patient-physician relationship as a reciprocity of vulnerability and responsiveness. This "doubled agency" leads them to a reassessment of principlism; in their view ethical principles are the boundary conditions of that relationship, useful primarily when trust fails. * Kathryn Montgomery, Professor of Medical Humanities & Bioethics and Medicine, Northwestern University *
This is a good resource to highlight the patient perspective for clinicians. The authors allow patient stories to be told with little interruption, preserving an authentic patient voice, and still carry out an effective discussion and analysis of the contributions that these perspectives make to the ethics of healthcare. * Kathryn E. Raliski, MA, Doody's Health Sciences Book Review *
The essential opinions about patients expressed by the physicians in Healers are ineluctably subjective; they are not measurable and cannot be made objective. To comprehend that is to realize also how imperative thoughtful subjectivity is not only to clinical medicine and bioethics but also to how persons live their lives generally. Understand that, and you will begin to be free of scientism outside of its rightful domain. I believe you will come away from these books with an increased appreciation of healing and a wider and more human view of ethics. * Hastings Center Report *