Finding Hope in the Face-to-Face

The Article in Brief

Finding Hope in the Face-to-Face

Jennifer Y.C. Edgoose , and colleagues

Background This essay explores possibilities for generating hope through a low-tech means: the face-to-face encounter. Using a framework developed by the French philosopher and Holocaust survivor Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), the authors explore the unique responsibility and potential for hope found only in face to face encounters. They write that, although face-to-face encounters are at the heart of the patient-clinician relationship, their singular significance is often lost amid the demands of today's high-tech, metric-driven health care systems. They conclude that revisiting this most fundamental attribute of medicine is likely clinicians' greatest chance to reclaim who they are and why they do what they do.