What is the nature of the Physician-Patient relationship?
There are multiple models of the Physician-Patient relationship[10]. With respect to the role of spiritual care they polarixes about two disparate foci. 1. Biotechnical models Biotechnical models of health describe disease in cellular terms. Sick patients have defective cells with deranged chemicals and impaired communication between cells. In such models, medical care simply corrects biologic imbalances and restores or removes malfunctioning cells. These models have provided most of the scientific advances in medical care. Though excellent these models ignore patient fears as well as the meaning and symbolic significance of illness for these do not reside in the physical domain. Health care that ignores personal, relational and spiritual needs misses the human aspects of disease. 2. Virtue based altruistic models Virtue based altruistic models are more humanistic. They assume that clinicians are moral people with nurtured and trained character. These models supports patients’ desire f
