The Bedside Manifesto

The secret of patient care is caring for the patient. This book shows how.

“When I was in the hospital I was poked and probed and ultraviolated, but never touched,” a patient told Dr. Jeff Kane. Over the past forty years he's heard thousands of such stories from patients and their families. They appreciate medicine’s awesome technology, but yearn for low-tech contact. They want their suffering treated as well as their illness. Dr. Kane shows that our current “healthcare crisis” isn’t fundamentally economic, but social: where we’d benefit from skilled doctor-patient contact, we’ve been seduced into overusing expensive, invasive, and often hazardous technologies. The venerable “bedside manner” isn’t simply Marcus Welby congeniality; it’s powerfully therapeutic medicine. Dr. Kane describes it, shows how we lost it, and how we’ll regain it.

Dr. Jeff Kane has practiced medicine in venues as varied as the National Institutes of Health and county hospital emergency departments. Fascinated by patients’ stories, he began, in the mid-1970s, to limit his work to facilitating patient support groups. He founded the support programs at Sutter Cancer Center in Sacramento and Sierra Nevada Cancer Center in Grass Valley, CA, where he continues to facilitate and to direct psychosocial education. Jeff’s published many articles on the healing relationship along with two books, Be Sick Well (New Harbinger, 1991) and The Healing Companion (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).