In this groundbreaking volume, David Schenck and Larry Churchill present the results of fifty interviews with practitioners identified by their peers as "healers," exploring in depth the things that the best clinicians do. They focus on specific actions that exceptional healers perform to improve their relationships with their patients and, subsequently, improve their patients' overall health. The authors analyze the ritual structure and spiritual meaning of these healing skills, as well as their scientific basis, and offer a new, more holistic interpretation of the "placebo effect."...

This volume moves beyond ethics as problem-solving or ethics as etiquette to offer a look at ethics in primary care--as opposed to life-or-death--medical care. "Professional Ethics and Primary Care Medicine "deals with the ethics of routine, day-to-day encounters between doctors and patients. It probes beneath the hard decisions to look at the moral frameworks, habits of thought, and customs of practice that underlie choices. Harmon Smith and Larry Churchill argue that primary care, far from being merely a setting for the rendering of care, provides a new understanding of both physician and...