When the patient is a physician.

Abstract

IN recent years, much has been written about the physician–patient relationship. A less common but more intricate situation arises when physicians themselves become patients. Typically, this special relationship is then complicated by preexisting bonds that do not normally link physicians and their nonphysician patients. The treating physician and the physician patient may be colleagues in the same hospital, one may be the teacher or student of the other, they may refer patients to each other and thus act as business partners, or they may simply be friends who share the same social network. These additional bonds, the greater scrutiny given . . .