“(Patient-centered care) PCC can too easily become a signifier onto which too vast a variety of hopes and fears are displaced. PCC is most dangerous when used to support the idea that fixes can be local, individually focused, and legislated. If patient-centeredness is simply grafted onto existing medical systems, it will be a marketing slogan at best, and at worst will risk precipitating detrimental reallocations of resources.
For medicine to to become truly patient centered, medical workers . . . need to be supported in changing who they believe they are and how they see themselves in relation to their patients. . . .[P]atients . . . need to be shown that medicine does believe [they are] ‘worth it’, but without that worth having to be expressed in the currency of expensive and clinically counterproductive testing. . . .
[We] would not be speaking of PCC at all – instead patient-centeredness would be self-evident – if there were not deep professional institutional reasons for being centered on concerns other than patients.”
-Frank AW. Patient-Centered Care as a Response to Medification. Wake Forest Law Review 2010: 45(5): 1453-59
