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Faith, Confidence And Health Care: Fostering Trust In Medicine Through Law, Robert Gatter

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article responds to the work of Professor Mark A. Hall, who has written an accompanying essay in reply, published in the same issue of the Wake Forest Law Review.

This Article identifies an emerging medical trust movement and challenges its normative claim that, as a matter of policy, the law should be used to preserve, if not promote, trust in medicine. Key to this challenge is the fact that the emerging movement defines medical trust in emotional terms as a kind of faith that goes beyond rationally based confidence. First, because the movement defines medical trust as faith, it …