Does Teaching Good Technical Skills Help Tomorrow’s Physicians Become Good Healers?
Patients’ trust is usually grounded in their physician’s technical expertise—most people don’t go to the doctor for social reasons. In the initial patient-physician encounter, the technical expertise of the physician is assumed. No matter how politely a doctor behaves, a perception of incompetence will erode a patient’s confidence and create a barrier to developing the therapeutic relationship. Purported practitioners of the art of healing who lack the requisite technical skills are not healers but charlatans. This is not to say that a limitation of knowledge or experience precludes effective healing. A general practitioner need not know how to perform complex surgery for a congenital heart defect to participate in the healing of a child who needs it, but she needs to know how to refer the child’s parent to a good surgeon and how to provide continuing primary care within her area of expertise. Such a patient still needs age-appropriate preventive care and, of course, compassion. At the
