I […] found the patient case studies presented throughout the book to be a fabulous way to introduce actual people, with actual, and indeed common concerns, and very human behaviors. These people were excellent at personifying difficult concepts and patient care challenges. […] The book provides a truly holistic approach and a thorough provision of information on a variety of subjects that truly comprise the possibility of “the patient as agent of health and health care.
Margaret Riley, Metapsychology Online Reviews
Mark Sullivan—psychiatrist, pain-specialist, and philosopher—brings a rare combination of talents to the central questions where does health come from, how is health produced, and what does being healthy mean? His answers turn traditional ideas of health care upside down. ‘It is the patient as agent,’ he argues, ‘who produces and enjoys health.’ The value of this extremely important book lies in its understanding of health as something that individual patients create through recognizing and exercising their own powers of agency. If we get health wrong, Sullivan warns, we will surely get health care wrong. This clear, thoughtful, detailed, remarkable guide will help patients and providers to get health right.
David B. Morris, author of The Culture of Pain & Eros and Illness
The medical world is fully ‘patient-centered!’ Aside from reinforcing the ethical requirements that patients be respected, informed, and consenting agents in their care, the concept is too often minimal and empty. Mark Sullivan is an important voice in providing an in-depth understanding of this first truly new direction in medicine since the entrance of science in the 19th century. He cannot fail to enrich your thinking and have an impact.
Eric J. Cassell, MD, M.A.C.P., Emeritus Professor Weill Cornell Medical College
This is an important book. In his startling and fresh look at the health care enterprise, psychiatrist Mark Sullivan enters into a reconsideration of what health really is and concludes that health is about enhancing capability – the capability to live life in a way to enhance meaning and fulfillment, which can exist in the presence or absence of disease. Sullivan argues convincingly that accepting the role of patient, in its emphasis on passive adherence, limits peoples’ vision of health to merely minimizing pathology. His solution – restoring agency and personhood – compellingly recaptures and expands the true meaning of what it means to be patient-centered (or, better, person-centered). A pragmatist, humanist and deep thinker, Sullivan proposes how the health care enterprise can remove encumbrances that restrict health, as patients define it, on their own terms, so that individuals can become the subjects rather than mere objects of care.
Ronald M Epstein, MD, University of Rochester Medical Center, author of Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness and Humanity
Lots of the rhetoric coming from health care organizations these days advertises care that is patient-centered or personal or treats one as a person, not a disease. It sounds good, but what does this really mean? The Patient as Agent of Health and Health Care argues convincingly that it is the person/patient who produces their health, and the health care system can either help or undermine them in their pursuit of health. The book has important messages for both patients and health-care providers in their quest for truly patient-centered care.
Ed Wagner, MD, MPH, Director (Emeritus), MacColl Center