Patient-Centered Medicine: A Human Experience emphasizes the health professional's role in caring for patients as unique individuals by focusing on the patients' psychological and social realities as well as their biological needs. The book concerns itself with caring for the whole patient, and outlines the basic principles involved in developing a biopsychosocial approach to medical practice. This is a volume of guidelines that will help medical students and clinicians develop and master basic attitudes and skills essential to providing empathic and comprehensive medical care. As Norman Cousins writes in the foreword, 'The authors understand and repeatedly demonstrate in this book, that the patient-physician relationship is a powerful, sometimes mysterious, frequently healing interaction between human beings. It is the person of the doctor and the presence of the doctor-just as much and frequently more than-what the doctor does that creates an environment for healing. The physician represents restoration. The physician holds the lifeline.' Since the book's original publication by University Park Press in 1984, greater awareness and acceptance of the biopsychosocial model has occurred, and medical schools are now working to fully integrate psychosocial education into the clinical curriculum.

Foreword: Dr. Andrew WeilForeword: Physician as Humanist, Norman CousinsPreface: David Rosen and Uyen HoangPrologue: An Early Career Female Physician's Perspective, Uyen Hoang1. Medicine as a Human Experience2. Clinical Application of the Biopsychosocial ModelGeorge L. Engel3. The Care of the Patient: Art or ScienceGeorge L. Engel4. The Doctor-Patient Relationship5. The Patient-Centered Interview6. The Experience of Illness and Hospitalization7. The Nature of the Healing ProcessEpilogue: Desiderata