FOREWORD FOR IMPROVING YOUR BEDSIDE MANNER

By Victor S. Sierpina, M.D.

Bedside manner is not an immediate benefit of having earned an M.D. degree. It involves skills, sensitivities, and interpersonal style that can and should be cultivated, however. I recommend this practical, how-to handbook as a "must read" manual for medical school and residency training in communication skills and professionalism.

Immensely thoughtful, practical, and succinctly organized, each chapter offers provocative, reflective examples of how physicians can communicate better with patients as well as improve their own self awareness. The book is helpfully divided into 10 chapters, each of which provides a definition of a specific professional communication skill, background about a professional characteristic, and provides model and "toxic" examples of how sensitive, critical clinical conversations take place.

The chapter themes cover the waterfront of what every aspiring and practicing physician needs to know to optimize their bedside manner. These qualities are respect, genuineness, empathy, warmth, self-disclosure, concreteness, immediacy, confrontation, potency, and self-actualization. This short, highly readable handbook shows how to implement these professional values and skills in a highly practical way. It does this in a heartfelt, holistic, psychologically and clinically sophisticated manner that is motivational and easy to learn.

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Dr. Victor S. Sierpina, MD, is Professor of Family Medicine with tenure at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Texas. He is the first designated W.D. and Laura Nell Nicholson Family Professor of Integrative Medicine at UTMB. He graduated from the University of Illinois Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine as a James Scholar and completed Family Practice Residency at MacNeal Memorial Hospital in suburban Chicago. Since medical school he has integrated holistic medicine, alternative therapies, and wellness promotion in primary care. Dr. Sierpina is board certified by the American Board of Family Medicine and the American Board of Holistic Medicine. He was recently recognized as one of the Best Doctors in the USA in Family Medicine. He is recipient of two NIH grants supporting his educational and research efforts in integrative medicine.