Doctor-Patient Relationship

Comprehensive and practical handbook on ethical and legal issues affecting Gps and other practitioners

This new text uses a lifecycle framework to discuss the factors that influence the psychosocial development of an individual from conception through advanced old age. It also focuses on key issues relating to the patient-professional relationship.

Verbal and non-verbal exchanges during medical visits are seen by Roter and Hall as having highly significant impacts on the doctor-patient relationship and the efficacy of health care. The effectiveness, indeed the appropriateness, of medical care is itself impacted by the social and psychological processes involved as doctor and patient meet. Roter and Hall analyze how a number of important factors can tend to condition both doctors and patients to roles that then can become barriers to a positive relationship. They detail principles and approaches that will improve the medical visit experience for both doctor and patient.

Few doctors have undergone formal training in interpersonal skills, and even fewer are aware of the complex factors that influence their own feelings and emotional responses and of the messages they convey to their patients during every professional consultation. This book addresses the needs of family and other physicians to better understand their emotions, enhance their self-awareness, improve their communications skills, and apply these skills more effectively within the constraints of clinical practice and teaching. A multi-disciplinary approach common to the practice of family medicine is used.

The Handbook of Health Communication brings together the current body of scholarly work in health communication. With its expansive scope, it offers an introduction for those new to this area, summarizes work for those already learned in the area, and suggests avenues for future research on the relationships between communicative processes and health/health care delivery. The Handbook begins with a macro perspective on the contribution of theory to health communication. It then illuminates the scope of health communication around the contextual frameworks traditionally used in the discipline of communication. The contents are organized into six parts, which break out as follows: Part I: Introduction addresses some introductory theoretical and meta-theoretical issues related to health communication. Part II: Provider-Patient Interaction Issues discusses such issues as communication skills training, outcomes of provider-patient interaction, disclosure issues, methods for studying provider-patient interaction, and special populations. Part III: Social and Community Health Issues emphasizes such issues as community organizing and health risk management, social support, everyday interpersonal communication and health, and marginalized populations. Part IV: Organizational Issues includes chapters on organizational forms, stress and social support, groups and teams in health care, organizational rhetoric, and working well. Part V: Media Issues offers chapters on health campaigns and communication design strategies, narrowcast health messages, telemedicine, health public relations and information in the media, and health literacy. Part VI: Lessons and Challenges From the Field focuses on lessons learned in the field, including important contributions by those who have worked to combine academic with policy/practitioner perspectives within the field of health communication, and concludes with a focus on ethics in health communication research. With contributions from top scholars in health communication, public health, and related areas, this Handbook establishes a benchmark in current scholarship and research. The chapters included here provide definitive examinations of the various aspects of health communication, and encourage readers to delve further into these areas on their own through an examination of the representative citations. The Handbook of Health Communication is intended for students, researchers, and practitioners with interests in the various aspects of health communication, and it will serve as an essential resource and reference for all concerned with health communication issues.

Mental Health and Physical Health are undeniably connected. One cannot recover physically, if there is still mental suffering, and vice versa. The essays collected here examine the relationship between mental and physical health, and how that relationship flourishes or suffers in a managed care environment. Understanding more about how the psychological aftereffects of an illness, and the best ways to respond to them, will ultimately enhance the care offered to patients. The contributors offer a wide range of examples of linked physical and mental illnesses, with advice on how best to responsibly address and treat both.Clinicians and practitioners will welcome this guide to navigating a managed care system and working with patients to heal both their mental and physical maladies equally.