Abstract
American medicine is awakening to its patients' complaints about feeling disregarded as whole persons. Much recent commentary chides physicians for focusing upon lab values and body parts and for ignoring the fears, hopes, values, and life histories of patients and their loved ones (Abramovitch and Schwartz 1996).1 It criticizes clinical caretakers for failing to engage their patients in joint decisionmaking, genuinely responsive to individuals' subjective concerns (Katz 1993). It calls upon clinicians to empathically engage their patients — to connect with them emotionally and to enter into their frames of reference (Bellet and Maloney 1991) — in order to better understand how their patients see their lives and illnesses. It asks physicians to allow themselves to be emotionally stirred by their patients and to communicate with rich detail to fellow caretakers about their patients as persons (Spiro 1992).