It's Friday, February 28, 2025. I'm Albert Mowler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Are we experiencing a widespread failure of trust across American institutions, professions, authorities. That's one of the questions

raised by a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. It appeared just in yesterday's print edition,

why we no longer trust doctors like we used to. Now, that's something that requires a little bit of

thinking, and perhaps we can make some fruitful progress and just trying

to understand, is there something going on here? And if so, what? What does it mean? How should Christians

look at this kind of decline of trust in a profession? Well, first of all, as we look at this article

by Claire Ansbury, we understand that it's pretty well documented that patients these days do not look to

doctors as the same kind of authority figures as had been true in the past. They look at physicians

as influential figures, authority figures to a degree, but there has been a widespread erosion of

the basic institutional and professional trust.

Let's ask the question why.

Well, in large part, this reflects a massive shift, indeed a revolution in the relationship

between patients and doctors.

As you look back to say just even the 1950s and the 1960s, physicians usually dressed in a white coat represented

absolute medical authority. And then there was a massive shift. What was that shift? Well,

the shift is demonstrated, for example, in what's known as a patient's bill of rights. Nothing like

that had existed before. It was a massive redefinition of the

relationship between physicians and their patients. Going back to the classical age of the physician

and authority, physicians, doctors often made decisions without really consulting the patient at all.

The idea of informed consent is a remarkably modern notion.

Nowadays, we look at the morality of the relationships that exist in professional medicine,

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