What Makes the Patient-Doctor Relationship Therapeutic? Exploring the Connexional Dimension of Medical Care
Publication: Annals of Internal Medicine
Volume 108, Number 1
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Abstract
Physicians do not receive from the medical model the same explicit guidance in relating to their patients as in making diagnoses and prescribing pharmacologic and other treatments. To meet this need, we offer a framework for expanding the model. Therapeutic contact takes place within a connexional, or transpersonal, dimension of human experience, within which basic human needs for connection and meaning are met. Although seldom explicitly recognized, connexional experience is basic to medical care. Awareness of this dimension of experience leads clinicians to appreciate that establishing a therapeutic relationship is one of the principal goals of medical practice. It also reframes the doctor's task to make clinical uncertainty more tolerable and situations in which there is no appropriate biomedical response (such as care of the terminally ill) less frustrating and more fulfilling.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Annals of Internal Medicine
Volume 108 • Number 1 • 1 January 1988
Pages: 125 - 130
History
Published in issue: 1 January 1988
Published online: 1 December 2008
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Copyright
© 1988 American College of Physicians.
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What Makes the Patient-Doctor Relationship Therapeutic? Exploring the Connexional Dimension of Medical Care. Ann Intern Med.1988;108:125-130. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-108-1-125
What Makes the Patient-Doctor Relationship Therapeutic? Exploring the Connexional Dimension of Medical Care. Ann Intern Med.1988;108:125-130. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-108-1-125
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