Most health professionals believe that more humanistic treatment of patients and families is an essential part of our profession and helps us to improve the quality of care. However, even though many of us try to acquire those humanistic values and improve on them, many difficulties still exist when we try to maintain them throughout our professional lives. 

We may also have questions about how to transmit them to trainees. 

Recently, a study has been published entitled Attitudes and Habits of Highly Humanistic Physicians, which attempts to address this issue in order to discover the goals and values that are the central themes of our humanistic attitudes. These are the attitudes and habits which allow us to continue to feel humanistic in our work even though it becomes more technical every day. They also and allow us to educate others to those values.

If you want to learn more, I highly recommend you visit the website of The Arnold P. Gold Foundation or read the post, What are the habits of highly humanistic physicians? written by the study’s main author, on the foundation’s blog, Humanizing Medicine.


The Arnold P. Gold Foundation has worked for more than 25 years with healthcare professionals in training and in practice to instill a culture of respect, dignity and compassion for patients and professionals. It is a public non-profit organization established in 1988 by Arnold and Sandra Gold and their colleagues at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. 
Eighty percent annual budget is derived from altruistic donations.

Humanistic medical care is not simply compassion. It is the best of medicine. When skilled physicians build caring, trusting and collaborative relationships with patients, studies reveal more appropriate medical decisions, better patient adherence with treatment plans, and less costly healthcare outcomes.

With the impressive development of Science and Technology,  along with current healthcare economics, today more than ever we must make the effort to provide humanistic health care.

Daniel Muñiz
Intensive Care Physician
Hospital Comarcal de Inca