Patient as expert

The context for "patient" is a person who feels ill, and needs others to arrive at an improvement. The steps in scientific medicine are: urgent care-diagnosis-treatment, over time. The need for others varies with time and with the nature of the tools needed for improvement. If a "cure" has only cognitive elements, then surgeons, interventional radiologists would not be needed, and DIY stents would be available over-the-counter. There may always be a need for others with more knowledge, skills, or experience at various points along the journey.
Providers have studied to acquire this set of knowledge, skills and experience over numerous subjects. Most patients call on a subset of this information space with a need for one or two entities, diagnoses, paradigms, syndromes. The more specific the illness state, the more readily a patient can become an expert on it, to a depth exceeding the harassed GP who needs to have several hundred diagnostic entities and care patterns at hand and in mind.

The partnership between patient and provider is highly contingent on social relationships of respect, trust and acceptance of the other's knowledge. A provider who respects and trusts the patient's knowledge can defer all choices and decisions to the other, often seen when one doctors treats another, with no perceived need for recommendations.

The limiting factor of patient as expert is that true expertise is not just knowledge of a subject, but also knowledge of the subject's connections to all related subjects. What might be called wisdom increases as the boundaries of what one does not know comes more sharply into focus.

For the healing process to work well between the person who is ill, and all his or her assistants (providers), trust, respect, and acceptance of what the others know need to be mutually acknowledged.