Patients have personal strategies in solving the problems concerning their illness. Doctors have personal and professional strategies in solving the problems with their patients. This book explores the problematic triangle between doctors, patients and the illness, using illustrations from internal medicine, nephrology, cardiology, oncology and neurology.
Enhancement of the doctor-patient interaction is an important contribution to the mutual reduction of stress and therefore the improvement of the course of (long-term) illness.
The first part of the book describes reasons why the...

This book arises from a two-fold conviction. The first is that autonomy, despite recent critiques about its importance in bioethics and philosophy of medicine, and the traditional resistance of medicine to its "intrusion" into the doctor-patient relation, is a fundamental building block of an individual's identity and mechanisms for dealing with illness, disease, and incapacity. As such it is an essential component in the health care professional's armamentarium employed to bring about healing. Furthennore, it functions in a similar way to assist the health professional in his or her...

This book is the result of a long-standing clinical and educational cooperation between a medical psychologist (Bergsma) and a medical ethicist/philosopher (Thomasma). It is thoroughly interdisciplinary in its examination of the difficulties of honoring the patient's and the physician's autonomy, especially in light of the changes in health care worldwide today. Although autonomy has become the primary standard of bioethics, little has been done to link it to the ways people actually behave, nor to its roots in the healing relationship. Combining as it does the disciplines of psychology and...