In addition to the treatments and prescriptions they receive, most people hope for relationships with their clinicians that will themselves be healing. Yet few scholars have taken to time to understand just how relationships with healthcare providers can help patients get well. In this volume Schenck and Churchill synthesize the results of fifty interviews with practitioners identified by their peers as "healers." This book explores in depth the things that the best clinicians do. The focus is not on the many theories of healing, but on the specific actions that exceptional clinicians perform to improve their interaction 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. They offer a new, more holistic interpretation of the "placebo effect," and provide recommendations that will promote relational competence, as well as technical competence, in their students. Recognizing that the best healers are also people who know how to care for themselves, the authors examine responses to the question: "What activities that promote wellness, wholeness and healing do you personally engage in?" These responses will be of particular value to healthcare professionals. The final chapter explores the deep connections between the mastery of healing skills for patient care and the mastery of what the authors call the "skills of ethics." Being a good health care professional and being a good person are intimately related. Schenck and Churchill argue further that ethics should be considered a healing art, alongside the art of medicine. This book has relevance for everyone who is or will be a patient, everyone for whom relationships with healthcare providers make a difference-in short, all of us.

About the Author
Larry Churchill is Professor of Medical Ethics, center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University Medical CenterDavid Schenk: Research Fellow, Center for Clinical and Research Ethics, Vanderbilt University

Reviews
"The book powerfully shows how physicians' spiritual and physical dispositions contribute a great deal to the care they provide, showing the inseparability of personhood and excellence. Practitioners will find this a useful refresher about the things that really matter. Medical students and undergraduates who hope to be physicians will learn what they must do to become excellent practitioners... Recommended." -- CHOICE "The essential opinions about patients expressed by the physicians in Healers are ineluctably subjective; they are not measurable and cannot be made objective. To comprehend that is to realize also how imperative thoughtful subjectivity is not only to clinical medicine and bioethics but also to how persons live their lives generally. Understand that, and you will begin to be free of scientism outside of its rightful domain. I believe you will come away from these books with an increased appreciation of healing and a wider and more human view of ethics." -- Hastings Center Report



Book Information
ISBN 9780199735389
Author David Schenck
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 414g
Dimensions(mm) 214mm * 154mm * 30mm