ABSTRACT
Trust is important to the identity of those who deliver care such as physicians, nurses and pharmacists, and has remained important through a wide range of technological and institutional changes to the practice of medicine. In this chapter, we consider ethical and philosophical accounts of trust in medicine applied at three levels: the level of physician–patient relationships, the level of professions, and the level of the institutions of medicine. We conclude by considering whether some anticipated future changes in the practice of medicine might be so fundamental that they reduce the centrality of interpersonal trust to this practice.
