In the Hands of Doctors: Touch and Trust in Medical Care

Paul Stepansky’s In the Hands of Doctors: Touch and Trust in Medical Care explores the human face of doctoring in American medicine from the 19th century to the present. Arguing for the centrality of medical touch – both comfort touch and procedural touch – in building trust between doctors and patients, it addresses the nature of medical caring as it has evolved over two centuries. This task leads him to consider the relationship of medical technology to such caring; the nature and possibility of clinical empathy; the impact of physician rating services on doctor-patient relationships; and the need to recruit and train physicians who can bring a caring sensibility to their patients. Mindful of the critical shortage of primary care physicians among the underserved, Stepansky proposes a new kind of primary care specialty, procedural care medicine, to promote the recruitment and retention of a new generation of frontline physicians. He also examines the expanding role of nurse practitioners in primary care medicine and the role of the patient-centered medical home as the site of primary care medicine.

In the Hands of Doctors is winner of an Independent Publisher Books Award Bronze Medal for 2017. The paperback edition includes a new Preface, Medical Freedom, Then, and Now, in which Stepansky mounts a stirring defense of Obamacare from the standpoint of past and present meanings of medical freedom and medical choice.