Invoking the Medical Humanities to Develop a #MedicineWeCanTrust

Trust is a complex phenomenon that resists easy definition, but it is easily recognizable, or rather its absence is impossible to miss. The author draws inspiration from the #MedsWeCanTrust movement to advocate for #MedicineWeCanTrust. Trust can be seen as a "soft," "tender-minded," optimistic condition fighting for survival in a "hard," "tough-minded," or jaundiced medicine. Modern medicine is traditionally patriarchal, individualistic, and resistant to encouraging democratic, collaborative habits as it socializes its young into hierarchical structures or eats them whole. Yet trust is a health intervention and essential for the innovative expansion of medical culture as it encourages authentic democracy, interprofessional clinical teamwork, and patient-centeredness. Increases in trust lead to greater tolerance of uncertainty, one of the primary goals of medical education. Recent curriculum development work has shown that the medical humanities offer a superb delivery mechanism for ensuring democratic habits in medicine that align with social justice agendas, key to addressing links between social inequalities and compromised physical and mental health. Where lack of trust is associated with cynicism in doctors, increasing trust loosens dependence upon suffocating control mechanisms. This allows medicine to take on the moral concerns and uncertainties of an adulthood that also promises emotional warmth, guidance, support, and improved communication between colleagues and with patients. Medicine must embrace trust as the matrix of health care, and the medical humanities can educate for values such as tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity as a basis for engendering trust.