Patient-Centred Medicine: Transforming the Clinical Method (4e)

Patient-Centred Medicine: Transforming the Cinical Method 3rd editionBy: Moira Stewart, Judith Belle Brown, Wayne W. Weston, Thomas R. Freeman, Bridget L. Ryan, Carol L. McWilliam, and Ian R. McWhinney.

It has been 10 years since the third edition of this book. Is the patient-centered clinical method still relevant given the massive problems facing society? In our view, patient-centered health care is even more relevant today in helping to swing the pendulum back from divisiveness toward healing and hope.

This book makes the case that patient-centered care is an important force counteracting these negative influences and has abiding value as an anchor during troubled times.

There has been a resurgence of interest in patient-centered, compassionate, and whole person care: a reawakening of how it works in our current society…Our goal, in launching this fourth edition, is to place the patient-centered clinical method in the current world context and provide constructive information and encouragement.

The publishers say: "The patient-centered clinical method has been a core tenet of the practice and teaching of medicine since the first edition of Patient-Centered Medicine – Transforming the Clinical Method in 1995. This timely fourth edition continues to define the principles underpinning the patient-centered clinical method using four major components, clarifying its evolution and consequent development and brings the reader fully up to date. It reinforces the relevance of the method in the current much-changed realities of health care: in a world where virtual care will remain common; with rising dependence on technology; and with societal changes away from compassion, equity, and relationships toward confrontation, inequity, and self-absorption."