Is Good Bedside Manner Important if Physicians Can Cure Patients with Their Technical Experience?
“Good bedside manner” defies easy definition, but let us assume it involves the empathic listening skills described above, a demeanor that sets a patient at ease and demonstration of an active interest in the patient’s individuality. A simple answer to the question asked above is “yes,” not only because patients value good bedside manner—and comply with medical regimens more often and file lawsuits less often when it is present—but also because, for the most part, doctors do not really “cure” patients. What physicians mostly do is support, protect or encourage a patient’s own natural processes of restoration. Sometimes doctors modify or interfere with natural processes, but most of the time when trying to do so they merely exchange one disease for another. Even in cardiology, arguably the area of medicine that has recently done the most to avert mortality and morbidity and prolong life expectancy, cardiologists very often “rescue people from a relatively sudden death from myocardial in
