n the following pages, Dr. Greenberg delineates the complex forces at Iplay within patients who are newly ill or disabled, within physicians who do their best to guide patients through those debilities, and in the inter- tion that patient physician dyads perform thousands of times daily to try to make sense of the patient s plight. As a physician and medical educator who thinks about how to enhance communication between patients and physicians, I often view commu- cation challenges as arising from divergent cultural experiences. Each patient has a unique method of experiencing, deriving...