a favorite quotation

the doctor-patient relationship,
a partnership

Patients will not acquiesce to the ultimate alienation of being reduced to standardized objects. No one will accept for long being merely identified by their illness, or seen as nothing but an assemblage of broken down biologic parts.

Patients crave a partnership with physicians who are as sensitive to their aching souls as to their malfunctioning anatomy. They yearn not for a tautly drafted business contract, but for a covenant of trust between equals earned by the doctor while exercising the art of caring.

Writes Bernard Lown, a co-recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, and professor emeritus of cardiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. In conclusion, Lown quotes the essayist Anatole Broyard:

I wouldn't demand a lot of my doctor's time. I just wish he [or she] would brood on my situation for perhaps five minutes, that he would give me his whole mind just once, be bonded with me for a brief space, survey my soul as well as my flesh .... Without some such recognition, I am nothing but my illness.