Virtual Mentor. November 2001, Volume 3, Number 11.

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Fostering Trust in the Patient-Physician Relationship

One of the challenges the profession faces in shaping medicine's future, presented as part of VM's two-year commemorative issue.

Fostering Trust in the Patient-Physician Relationship assesses the significance of trust in the therapeutic relationship. Despite the changes in the health care system, disease will always create vulnerability, and patients will always need to have confidence that physicians are acting in their best interest.

Through the Physician's Eyes: The Patient(Internet)-Physician Relationship - by Clarence H. Braddock III, MD, MPH
Patients are entering the clinical encounter with unprecedented amount of information gathered from various sources, including the Internet.

Through the Physician's Eyes: A Racist Parent - by William McDade, MD, PhD
An attending physician in an urban teaching hospital faces an ethical dilemma when a mother refused to allow an African American medical student to examine her child.