The Construction of Physician-patient Trust. A Case Report of an Oncologist’s Consults in Palliative Care

Abstract

The term bioethics generally refers to the study of the ways in which science and more particularly medicine influence our lives and our environment. It is fundamentally concerned with issues relating to the beginning and the end of human lives. This contribution describes an analysis of medical discourse in a palliative context, and more in particular it shows how trust is constructed between an oncologist and his terminal patients during follow-up visits in the academic hospital of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.