A Research Of Doctor-patient Relationship From The Medicine Anthropological Perspective

With the improvement of living standards and the outbreak of health issues due to environmental problems since the reform of China, the demand for quality health care services becomes greater. Coupled with the increase of legal and human right awareness as well as the awareness of patient groups on their limitation to exercise such rights, conflicts between patient and doctor groups showed a rising trend. The primary contributing factor to this situation is the commercialization of medical services. More importantly, such conflicts could not be simply addressed from a rational point of view because disputes usually are caused by the cognitive differences between doctors and patients which are hard to reconcile, and the needs of patient are on multilevel nature.By participative survey, interviews in the field study and adopting the perspective of medical anthropology, this paper aims to explore the cognitive differences between doctors and patients and the causes for such differences in a cultural specific setting. Through the analysis on the patient’s hierarchy of needs, the underneath causes of the doctor-patient conflicts are revealed, which reflect how the needs and satisfaction of such needs of both doctors and patients do not matched each other. Based on this research, it is hoped that effective relieving solutions to the doctors-patients tension could be found by the change of the communication space.