Healthcare ethics has been dominated by the voices of professionals. This book listens to the voices of patients and argues that patients' perceptions should form the core ethical obligations and insights for "good care." This is the ethical meaning of "patient-centered care."

This book, a follow-up to Healers (OUP, 2012), answers two basic questions: As patients see it, what things allow relationships with healthcare providers to become therapeutic? What can this teach us about healthcare ethics? The authors present detailed descriptions and analyses of 55 interviews with 58 patients, representing a wide spectrum of illnesses and clinician specialties. What becomes visible is an ethics of everyday interdependence, with mutual responsibilities that follow from a moral symbiosis. Professional expressions of healthcare ethics and the field of bioethics need to be informed and reformed by this distinctive, more patient-centered, turn in how we understand both patient care as a whole and the ethics of care more specifically. The authors ultimately present a revised code of ethics for health professionals, as well as the implications for medical and health professions education.

The essential opinions about patients expressed by the physicians in Healers are ineluctably subjective; they are not measurable and cannot be made objective. To comprehend that is to realize also how imperative thoughtful subjectivity is not only to clinical medicine and bioethics but also to how persons live their lives generally. Understand that, and you will begin to be free of scientism outside of its rightful domain. I believe you will come away from these books with an increased appreciation of healing and a wider and more human view of ethics.