Communication and Relationships in Medicine.

New Perspectives for Medical "Etiquette"

Patients, if trust their doctors, are committed to them and this affects clinical outcomes. One thousand patients have been interviewed in family practice waiting rooms.

Everyday medical practice, as takes place in the context of inter-personal relationships, has always kept an extra-scientific dimension. The physician’s way of doing is concurrently influenced on one side by this humanistic component and on the other side by the clinical reasoning, grounded on objective, statistically analysed observations and on their biochemical and pathophysiological interpretation. However, it is common opinion that in the last decades the former of these two aspects of medicine is quite vanishing, pushed away by the scientific and technical progress and by socio-economic constraints.