Thyroid Cancer: One Doctor-Patient Partnership—The Newcastle Butterfly Model

Abstract

The doctor-patient partnership is a huge, rapidly expanding area within medicine and the benefits of close working relationships between physician and patient are now being widely recognized. Shared decision making between the parties (as opposed to paternalistic and informed) should now be an integral part of medicine as patient satisfaction and behavior including compliance and clinical outcomes are all improved with closer working relationships [1]. It is also a requirement for the UK’s medical regulatory body, the GMC, that “for a relationship between doctor and a patient to be effective, it should be a partnership based on openness, trust and good communication…” [2, 3]. The object of this chapter, therefore, is to review how a good doctor-patient partnership can produce outstanding results to the benefit of both parties by reviewing one such example in thyroid cancer rather than rehearse the arguments for different types of doctor-patient relationships.