[Patient rights and the physician-patient relationship]

Although in Norway the patient's freedom to influence medical decisions has so far been restricted to the right to refuse treatment, patient rights is an issue of increasingly importance in medical practice. One reason is the (paradoxically) increased awareness that public health care is unable to meet the public's need for basic health care. Another reason is the declining confidence in physicians' ability and commitment to meeting the need of the individual patient. High technology medicine (diagnostical and therapeutic) reduces the close and personal bonds between physician and patient. Medicine as a market also increases the need for patient rights to secure the quality of the services paid for. More people are being considered in need of health care as a consequence of modern medicine's strong emphasis on risk and early diagnosis for an increasing number of conditions. This leaves fewer people free to remain non-patients. This new limit to personal freedom is rarely problematized. Rights may be powerful tools for the strongest groups of patients, but the most valuable aspects of the art of medicine--trust, empathy and understanding, cannot be enhanced through legal rights, only through increased emphasis on the humanistic aspect of medicine.