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For Immediate Release

NEW BOOK HELPS DOCTORS RELATE TO PATIENTS

Improving Your Bedside Manner provides foundation for effective doctor-patient relationship

(June 9, 2008. Austin, Texas). Doctor visits in the U.S. have surged 20 percent in the last five years, to more than 1.2 billion visits annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even as the population ages, the number of doctors is falling across the country, and experts predict that office-wait times will increase in the coming years.

One of the biggest challenges, and disappointments, patients often have with their doctors is the lack of communication. Jacquelyn Small’s latest book, Improving Your Bedside Manner – A Handbook for Physicians to Develop Therapeutic Conversations with their Patients has debuted nationwide to provide a workable tool to help doctors optimize their communication with their patients.

“This book is designed to help physicians have quick and simple therapeutic conversations with their patients – both for their patients’ well being, and also, interestingly, to reduce the odds of being sued,” said the author. Ms. Small is an Austin, Texas-based psychotherapist, workshop leader and author of 10 books in the fields of counselor skills training and personal transformation.

Two bodies of research demonstrate a vital need for physicians to improve their bedside manner.

• Findings reveal 10 “naturally therapeutic” personality traits that correlate with effective and therapeutic communication(1), and

• Doctors who “come from the heart” rarely, if ever, get sued for malpractice(2).

Based on Becoming Naturally Therapeutic, Jacquelyn Small’s now-classic handbook on the art of counseling, Improving Your Bedside Manner is crafted to help physicians enhance their use of the 10 traits to have quick and simple therapeutic conversations with their patients.

Each personality characteristic is defined and described and thoroughly illustrated in sample dialogues between a physician and patient. How a “toxic response” sounds is illustrated as are the pitfalls faced if a quality is misused or overused. These sample dialogues were written by Ms. Small in collaboration with Dr. Jim Mulry, a family practice physician with over 30 years of clinical practice in Wisconsin and currently, Syracuse, Indiana.

“The mind/body medicine field is replete today with facts proving that our emotional life feeds our physical health to a dramatic degree, noted especially in cancer and heart attack survivors,” Ms. Small explained. “Research indicates that the naturally therapeutic characteristics, defined and modeled for physicians in this book, correlate with high-functioning counselors and guides of any kind. These natural traits that we already possess can be rapidly enhanced or acquired simply by giving them attention and practice.”

Initial praise for the book from practicing physicians and medical researchers has been overwhelmingly positive.

Dr. Victor Sierpina, Director of Family Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston writes, “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.”

“Jacquelyn Small discusses the often murky subject of the doctor-patient relationship in clear and humanistic terms. Improving Your Bedside Manner is not just about the surface of bedside manner,” writes Dr. Patricia Gerbarg, a psychiatrist at New York Medical Center.

The book, “probes the forces within both the patient and the doctor that give rise to positive and negative interactions,” says Dr. Gerbarg. “In reading this book, medical students will learn good lessons before they acquire bad habits. Seasoned clinicians will gain awareness of the effects their behavior may be having, discover how to improve their bedside manner, and achieve better rapport with their patients.”

The book has received additional endorsements from a variety of healthcare professionals, several of whom believe that principles of this book should be integrated into the curricula of every medical school.

But, curiously, even though the book was written for physicians, the initial interest has come from patients who have ordered it to give as a gift to their doctor. Says high school music teacher Coral Nunnery “though my doctor has wonderful bedside manner, she would like to have a copy for others. And I would like to drop off a few anonymously around the facility where I recently had surgery!”

About Jacquelyn Small

Jacquelyn Small, LMSW, is widely recognized in the field of psychotherapy training and is the author of 10 books on personal growth, including the widely regarded Becoming Naturally Therapeutic (Bantam), Awakening in Time and Transformers: The Artists of Self-Creation. Active in professional counselor training for over 30 years, she has degrees in Clinical Social Work and Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the founding director of Eupsychia Institute, a non-profit service provider in counselor healing and training.

Books are available from
Eupsychia Institute
Phone: 1-800-546-2795,
Improving Your Bedside Manner
and Amazon.com

Book data
ISBN: 978-0-939344-22-2
Retail: $16.95
Publisher: Eupsychian Press
Trade paperback
March 2008

References

1. See Truax CB, Carkhuff RR. "Toward Effective Counseling and Psychotherapy: Training and Practice." Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1967. See also the work of Wolf S. "An Investigation of Counselor Type, Client Type, Level of Facilitative Conditions and Client Outcome," Catholic University of America, Dissertation Abstracts International, 1970, 31, Order No. 70-22,093.

2. Kolata G. "In Patient Care, Empathy is the RX for Ill Manners, Doctors Learn." Austin American-Statesman, Nov. 30, 2005, pp. A-1,A-9.