Professional Presence

Introduction

Professional presence can be described as an inter-prejudiced encounter between a medical practitioner and a patient whereby the medic treats his/her patient as a unique human being involved with an unusual circumstance. Presence describes how an individual interacts with the people around him/her, and in a medical environment, the process is quite encouraged (Adams & Andrew, 2012, p4).

Two models of Health and Healing

Throughout medical history, medics have periodically reviewed the techniques that they apply when administering medication. With the breakthroughs achieved with modern technology, doctors have changed how they treat their patients. As a result, medical experts have attained enhanced understanding throughout medical history on the values of human being, and this particular scenario has in return changed the medical profession and caregiving practices accordingly.

The first model applied in a medical setup is the physical body model of health. At a certain point in history, health and illnesses were considered to be medical conditions that came as a result of a physical fault within the human body system. If an individual got sick, the underlying situation was always attributed to having come from a physical cause, whether physical modality of treatment, surgery or medications. In the past, medical experts concentrated in treating visible wounds through objective assessment of patients. A patient’s feelings and emotions were believed to come from a chemical by-product through normal biological processes that occur inside the human body. These medical experts never thought that issues such as stress or fear might negatively influence an individual’s health. As a matter of fact, medical practitioners ultimately failed to treat some illnesses, and sometimes only treated a section of