Dr Kathryn Muyskens1
1Centre For Biomedical Ethics, National University Of Singapore, , Singapore
Biography:
Dr Kathryn Muyskens is a Research Fellow with CBmE, with a focus on Asian Bioethics, Elder Care, and AI. Originally from Colorado in the U.S., she came to Singapore in 2015 to pursue her PhD in Philosophy from Nanyang Technology University, graduating in 2019. She is a political philosopher and applied ethicist by training, and has research interests in human rights, and healthcare justice, and cross-cultural bioethics, with particular interest in trust, information, and inequality in access to healthcare.
Abstract:
Trust between a clinician (of any kind) and their patients is an essential component of the doctor-patient relationship. Without trust, patients may be less open about their health information and/or less compliant with treatment regimes, and this can undermine health outcomes. Building trust is a complex process and can be undermined by many factors, like language barriers, miscommunication, or interpersonal bias. For one example, in the Singaporean context, it has been observed that many patients do not disclose their consumption of traditional medicines to biomedical doctors or general practitioners. This phenomenon holds even in a country where approximately half of the population has used traditional medicine in the past year. To explore this phenomena of trust building and how it shapes the medical encounters and healthcare consumption habits of Singaporeans, we interviewed 15 medical professionals. Approximately half of these were Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioners and the other half from various biomedical specialties. In semi-structured interviews, we asked them to reflect upon and describe their relationships with patients and what (if anything) they do to consciously establish trust. Our results indicate that the relational dynamics between Singaporean patients and TCM practitioners are markedly different than their relationships with Western medical professionals. In this paper, we describe those differences and theorize on what underlying factors may shape the different relationship dynamics and try to glean insights into how doctor-patient relationships may be improved going forward in light of these insights.