MEDICINE AND HEALING

don't reduce to knowledge transfer. A Google search is no replacement for a healthy doctor/patient relationship! Susan Massad has spent a lifetime helping doctors and patients build healing relationships. The essays and articles in this book present a social therapeutic approach to the subjective/relational side of medicine—without which medicine, she argues, becomes dehumanized and sometimes deadly.

Patients have what doctors need most: the experience of their pain and symptomatology. Doctors have nuanced expertise with actual patients—beyond the generic data. As they build the doctor/patient relationship, says Massad, that's when the magic happens.