Are we educating a medical professional who cares?
R. G. Petersdorf and K. Turner
Association of American Medical Colleges, Washington, DC.
We examined four domains in which physicians must demonstrate their
capacity for caring. These include the knowledge base that forms the
foundation for the practice of medicine, the personal characteristics and
attributes that a physician brings to the profession, the individual
patients for whom the physician accepts responsibility, and the society in
which the physician lives. We conclude that the system of medical education
does produce caring physicians. The profession's history of self-evaluation
and criticism should not obscure medicine's real success in meeting its
responsibility to care as well as to cure.
