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What Makes the Patient-Doctor Relationship Therapeutic? Exploring the Connexional Dimension of Medical Care
Abstract
Physicians do not receive from the medical model the same explicit guidance in relating to their patients as in making diagnoses and prescribing pharmacologic and other treatments. To meet this need, we offer a framework for expanding the model. Therapeutic contact takes place within a connexional, or transpersonal, dimension of human experience, within which basic human needs for connection and meaning are met. Although seldom explicitly recognized, connexional experience is basic to medical care. Awareness of this dimension of experience leads clinicians to appreciate that establishing a therapeutic relationship is one of the principal goals of medical practice. It also reframes the doctor's task to make clinical uncertainty more tolerable and situations in which there is no appropriate biomedical response (such as care of the terminally ill) less frustrating and more fulfilling.
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Citations
Cites
The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine
Engel, G. L. (1977) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.847460 · Cited by 12,887
Cited by
Time and the Patient–Physician Relationship
Dugdale, D. C., Epstein, R., & Pantilat, S. Z. (1999) · Journal of General Internal Medicine · doi:10.1046/j.1525-1497.1999.00263.x · Cited by 609
Language Barriers in Medicine in the United States
Woloshin, S. (1995) · JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association · doi:10.1001/jama.1995.03520330054037 · Cited by 347
The Meaning Of Healing: Transcending Suffering
Egnew, T. R. (2005) · The Annals of Family Medicine · doi:10.1370/afm.313 · Cited by 326
Perception of empathy in the therapeutic encounter: Effects on the common cold
Rakel, D., Barrett, B., Zhang, Z., Hoeft, T., Chewning, B., Marchand, L., & Scheder, J. (2011) · Patient Education and Counseling · doi:10.1016/j.pec.2011.01.009 · Cited by 324
Shared Mind: Communication, Decision Making, and Autonomy in Serious Illness
Epstein, R. M., & Street, R. L. (2011) · The Annals of Family Medicine · doi:10.1370/afm.1301 · Cited by 257
Metadata
- Authors
- SUCHMAN, A. L., & MATTHEWS, D. A.
- Venue
- Annals of Internal Medicine
- Publisher
- American College of Physicians
- Published
- 1988-01-01
- Volume
- 108
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 125-130
- ISSN
- 0003-4819 (ISSN-L)
- 1539-3704
- OpenAlex
- W1993967964
- Cited by
- 205
- References
- 1
- FWCI
- 5.82
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- SUCHMAN, A. L., & MATTHEWS, D. A. (1988). What Makes the Patient-Doctor Relationship Therapeutic? Exploring the Connexional Dimension of Medical Care. Annals of Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-108-1-125
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
