Logos, ethos and pathos in balance - the care of the patient and the soul of the clinic: person-centered medicine as an emergent model of modern clinical practice.

In a recent discussion paper, Miles and Mezzich described person-centered medicine (PCM) as a model of modern medical practice that has emerged from the intellectual currents of the past century. In this commentary, we consider what PCM has to offer as a model for the clinical encounter and for clinical judgement. The doctor-patient relationship is an important thread in a person-centered medicine that visualizes the clinical encounter as a dialogue between 2 persons. Person-centered clinical judgement is concerned with the individual clinical case and as such is integrative, context-sensitive, interpretive and circumstantial. A care model incorporating these elements of dialogue and individualized judgement is ideal for older patients, for whom population-level guidelines are often inapplicable, who are often dependent on other persons and who are heterogeneous in their needs. As such a model, PCM is the dialectic synthesis arising out of decades of conflict between patient-centered medicine, and its antithesis, evidence-based medicine. If PCM is to progress from a prescriptive model to a descriptive model of modern medicine, its proponents must claim its philosophical commitments, keeping in mind that a model is fundamentally instrumental and not necessarily always literal. Medicine should look to a care model that is person-centered in the ways described here and that keeps the rational, virtuous and humane elements of practice in balance