Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
7531744 Ethics, Medicine and Public Health 2016 8 Pages PDF
Abstract
Considering patients as human persons first allows to improve the doctor-patient relationship while allowing doctors to be more efficient in exercising their profession. To treat patients as such consists in taking into account the whole of their constituents: the body, energy, emotion, and sense, without favoring one over the others. It is also to understand that the human being is constituted as such through someone else's eyes. Doctors, because of their particular vision and attention, can help patients evolve as humans. I propose three techniques to take emotions and sense into account, which can be easily implemented after reading this article. The interest of these techniques lies as much in their immediate effect as in the quality of the attention that they empower doctors with. The first technique consists in unveiling emotions underlying patients' speech through reformulation. The second one tracks generalizations at the root of limiting beliefs to help patients face the facts and then put their opinions into perspective. The last one uses techniques deriving from “methods of divination” to turn them into playful exercises of interpretation inviting to examine the patients' situation from a different point of view.
Related Topics
Health Sciences Medicine and Dentistry Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine
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