Trust has always been essential to medical care. Of what use are the best communication skills, physician empathy, or clinical knowledge if patients don’t trust the advice and information that their doctors give them?
Even the most psychologically disturbed or misanthropic TV doctor—from Doc Martin to Gregory House—can always be trusted to put his patients first; this is precisely because this trustworthiness is so central to our understanding of being a physician.
While this sort of idealization is commonplace and reassuring, it has become more and more problematic. For, in today’s medical world, the lines are blurring between doctors’ clinical decision making and their business decisions.
