Trust in Medicine: Its Nature, Justification, Significance, and Decline (Cambridge Bioethics and Law)
Cambridge University Press, 8/22/2019
EAN 9781108487191, ISBN10: 110848719X
Hardcover, 268 pages, 23.1 x 21.8 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Over the past decades, public trust in medical professionals has steadily declined. This decline of trust and its replacement by ever tighter regulations is increasingly frustrating physicians. However, most discussions of trust are either abstract philosophical discussions or social science investigations not easily accessible to clinicians. The authors, one a surgeon-turned-philosopher, the other an analytical philosopher working in medical ethics, joined their expertise to write a book which straddles the gap between the practical and theoretical. Using an approach grounded in the methods of conceptual analysis found in analytical philosophy which also draws from approaches to medical diagnosis, the authors have conceived an internally coherent and comprehensive definition of trust to help elucidate the concept and explain its decline in the medical context. This book should appeal to all interested in the ongoing debate about the decline of trust - be it as medical professionals, medical ethicists, medical lawyers, or philosophers.
Part I. Introduction
1. Introduction
2. Empirical evidence for the decline of trust
Part II. The Nature of Trust
3. A critical analysis of existing definitions of trust in medicine
4. Proposing a new type of definition
the pattern-based definition
5. A Pattern-based definition of trust
6. Differentiating trust from related concepts
7. Adapting the definition of trust to different situations
Part III. Justification of Trust
8. Justification of epistemic trust
9. Justification of patients' trust in physicians
Part IV. Significance of Trust
10. Instrumental utility of trust
11. The moral value of trust
Part V. The Decline of Trust
12. Reasons for the decline of trust
Part VI. Perspectives
13. Can we restore trust? List of references
Index.