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Richard J. Moldawsky, MD

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

The recent exploration of self-disclosure by McDaniel et al¹ is a cautionary tale for physicians who struggle to achieve a balance between building rapport and addressing a patient's concerns and medical needs. One may think of self-disclosure as an ingredient in the physician-patient relationship, and the data suggest that it has, so to speak, adverse effects (ie, diverting the therapeutic process). Therefore, it is better to apply the following dictum usually invoked in medicating older people: "start low, go slow." It is a lot easier to increase self-disclosure later than to back off once you have started down that road.

As a psychiatrist, I see parallels in the history of self-disclosure in psychotherapy, from classic psychoanalysis to the scores of psychotherapies seen today. Traditional psychoanalysts strongly cautioned against virtually any self-disclosure in the analytic setting. As a technical matter, self-disclosure affected the patient's ability to speak . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Physician Self-disclosure in Primary Care Visits: Enough About You, What About Me?
Susan H. McDaniel, Howard B. Beckman, Diane S. Morse, Jordan Silberman, David B. Seaburn, and Ronald M. Epstein
Arch Intern Med. 2007;167(12):1321-1326.
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