What Is a Doctor-Patient Relationship?
The doctor-patient relationship, be it positive or negative, is established in all ongoing patient-doctor interactions. It may be made up of a one-time consultation between a patient and physician or it can consist of a series of interactions over many years. It’s difficult to paint all such relationships with the some brush because they can be positive, negative, or neutral, and they may be long-term or exist for short periods of time only. What medical experts generally recognize is that neutral or, even better, positive interactions between patients and medical professionals improves quality of care through better communication. The idea of the doctor-patient relationship is often intricately tied to the concept of bedside manner. Doctors who have higher-level communication and listening skills, and exhibit emotive qualities like empathy tend to illicit more medical information from patients and can get more of a general sense of the patient’s health in context of all other aspects
