Lucia Siegel Sommers • John Launer
Editors
2013
In this book, Lucia Sommers and John Launer, with the accompanying input of their contributing authors, have done a deeply insightful and close-to-exhaustive job of defi ning clinical uncertainty. They identify its origins, components, and subtypes; demonstrate the ways in which, and the extent to which, it is intrinsic to medicine – to medical science, medical technology, and medical practice; and present a cogent case for its special relationship to primary care practice. More important, they powerfully and convincingly advocate for the intellectual, psychological, interpersonal, and existential value that forming and participating in small groups of primary care physicians, oriented around issues of medical uncertainty, can have for them and, as a consequence, for the way that they relate to their patients and the quality of care that they deliver to them. In “thickly descriptive,” ethnographic-like, narrative ways, the authors depict the micro-dynamics of the interactions between physicians that take place in such groups.
Clinical Uncertainty in Primary Care – The Challenge of Collaborative Engagement
