Coping with ambiguity and uncertainty in patient-physician relationships: I. Leadership of a physician.

A patient-physician relationship provides a milieu for a patient to achieve healing, solace, and reintegration of personhood. A patient's primary physician assumes a leadership role in that regard, coordinating and facilitating a regimen of analysis and therapy. The quality, quantity, and rapidity of technological advancements in the delivery of medical care, render any individual physician incomplete in terms of his ability to provide total care. Consequently, a succession of professional and paraprofessional personnel must be involved to maximize the care rendered. Nevertheless, a patient's primary physician must fulfill a leadership role as he coordinates consultations and interprets the data they provide, placing it in the appropriate situational context for his patient as part of a collective and mutual decision-making process. A patient's primary physician must be acknowledged to possess the power and authority to effect the care provided, as he must also accept the accountability, duty, obligation, and responsibility for the result of that care. By these means ambiguity and uncertainty are mitigated.